End of the Road

This is how the backseat looked after we'd extracted the two sleeping boys from their boosters.

And here are some road trip notes:

$4/gallon gas does help keep holiday drivers off the road, so we managed 300 miles today in 5 hours (including a stop for morale-boosting ice cream).

The ice cream sandwiches in King City, California, are so big even Eli can't finish one (believe me, he tried).

Speaking of ice cream, drumsticks are "a great example of fossil layers," says Ben.

We passed truckloads of garlic and broccoli, fields of romaine and artichokes, oil rigs (both off-shore and on land) and wind farms.

Visiting family is terrific (especially when there are young cousins to play with and a new book --no, for a change I don't mean mine! -- to talk about), but it's always good to be home.

A Good Day

#1: Sleeping in (yes, there was the 1-3 AM visit from Ben and the 6:00 AM visit from Eli, but I remained horizontal)

#2: Breakfast in bed--including freshly-baked scones from Tony-- with the Sunday Times

#3: A gift of new lip stuff and chocolate

#4: A mama-centric special at Ben and Eli's cafe (see photo above) and a most excellent mother's day banner (if you look closely, you'll see the letters are all train cars)

#5: A workshop/reading by the wonderful Lisa Garrigues, attended with a new mama-writer friend of mine

#6: Dinner at one of my favorite pizza places, with my three favorite guys.

I hope all you mamas out there had equally lovely days!

Happy Valentine's Day

I know, most of you will not read this till the day after the fact, but the day itself proved too busy for blogging. Still, I was just so delighted with Ben's card, I had to share.

Most days we have to rouse him at 7, and if we're doing well he's out of bed by about twenty after. This morning, I heard him get up and head downstairs on his own before I even had my slippers on, and when I finally got downstairs, this is what greeted me on the kitchen island.

Love is the best. Literate children are pretty great, too.

A Good Day in San Francisco

This has not been a good winter for San Francisco. We have not, for example, been to the zoo to ride Eli's beloved Puffer train since the Christmas Day tiger escape, and I'm not sure I'll ever feel safe enough there to return. I have mixed feelings about zoos, but there's something about the SF zoo, the sight of the giraffes' heads bobbing along above the eucalyptus trees, the waves from Ocean Beach crashing in the background, that always appealed to me.

Meanwhile, in other local news, the governor has slashed the public school budget (how are our teachers, already stretched to the limit, going to continue under these conditions?), and our street car line recently struck another pedestrian.

My kids don't know about any of this, of course, but it's all been wearing on me and I badly needed a good city day. And we had one last Friday. We started at Ben's school, where his kindergarten class, their fourth grade buddies, and assorted teachers, staff, and families gathered for a peace march in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. The kids paraded across the park to a shopping district, chanting slogans ("2! 4! 6! 8! We think Dr. King is great!") and singing Happy Birthday to the bemused smiles of shoppers and shopkeepers. We walked along beside them, Eli asking the whole way, "This the ha-pade? Where the ha-pade?"

After some time in the playground's train structure and lunch, I collected Ben from school (Tony and Eli having driven home for a nap), and we rode the bus downtown. A few stops along our journey, an older man boarded the bus and sat down next to Ben and me. He listened to us chatting about the parade and MLK for awhile, then pulled a piece of paper out of his bag and started to fold. Ben watched intently as the bird (pictured above) took shape. When he was done, the man handed it to Ben, who was delighted with his gift. "For me? Really?" and then checking with me, "Caroline, can I keep this?" The man and I both smiled our yeses to Ben, and the man then got out two more pieces of origami paper; handing one to me, he indicated (I only realized later that he never spoke to us) that I should fold along with him and learn. Two more birds emerged from the papers, just as we got to our stop. Ben bounced off the bus, holding his bird, delighted with this interaction with a stranger.

Next stop, the Museum of Modern Art for the Olafur Eliasson show. If this comes anywhere near you, go see it! Take the kids! It's a gorgeous, light-filled, fascinating exhibit, with many of the installations exposed so that you can see how they were created. Ben and I had a ball poking in and around the various pieces, and I think a Friday afternoon bus ride to MoMA might become a regular part of our monthly routine.

Ben then remembered the MLK memorial across the street, so off we went. It's a Maya Lin-inspired fountain/waterfall, with lines from King's speeches engraved on the walls next to huge photographs from various moments in the Civil Rights movement. Streams of water pour down ("let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream"), and the whole thing always makes me cry. Luckily Ben was there, threatening to topple headlong into the water, hollering at the pigeons, lightening up the mood.

And then last stop, reunited with Tony and Eli, who took the street car (without incident) downtown to meet us for dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Out the Door. We filled up on lemongrass tofu and chard with carmelized shallots, picked up some chocolate gelato for dessert, and then loaded two tired boys back on to the street car for the ride home. It was a fine day in San Francisco.

Celery Root & Potato Gratin

OK, I know this might not sound like the most delicious thing (and I'm certainly moving a long way from marshmallows and the other sweets I've been posting about) but this was one of the big successes of my holiday cooking last week. My parents spent the week with us, and I always use their visits to try out new recipes. Gracious guinea pigs that they are, they do not turn up their noses at new flavors like some small people I know and love. But although the boys rejected this one, the rest of us gobbled it up. The celery root is delicate and sweet, the potatoes rich and creamy -- it's a delicious wintery dish.

1 garlic clove, peeled and smashed
1 t butter
1 celery root, about a pound
1 pound potatoes, preferably Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn
1/2 c cream
2 t dijon mustard
1 c grated Gruyere
1 t fresh thyme
salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 375. Rub a gratin dish with the garlic, and then with the butter.

Peel the celery root, quarter, and then slice it 1/4" thick. Steam for 8-10 minutes, until tender. Remove to a large bowl.

While the celery root slices are steaming, peel and slice the potatoes 1/4" thick also. Then, once the celery root is out of the steamer, steam potato slices until tender, 5-8 minutes. Add them to the celery root in the bowl.

Mix the cream and mustard together, then pour over the vegetables and toss well. Season with the thyme and salt and pepper to taste. Pour mixture into gratin dish, smooth it out, and cover with the grated cheese.

Bake, covered, for 30 minutes; then uncover and bake an additional 15-20 minutes, until bubbling and nicely browned on top.

Adapted from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone

Toasted Coconut Marshmallows

OK, these are just too easy not to make. And we're having a party next week, and these keep a long time, so why not feed the people marshmallows?! The only change I'd make to the recipe is to not toast the coconut for 7 minutes unless you like it burned. That's all.

This picture is of the giant marshmallow before I cut it into dozens of marshmallow babies. I'm tempted now to make a multi-layered marshmallow birthday cake someday; wouldn't it be beautiful? You could dye the layers different colors with food coloring, cut them into whatever shapes you like. . . Sweet, fun, and so jiggly, too!

Miracle on 11th Avenue

First, go read my latest column at Literary Mama, on Miracle on 34th Street. Come on back when you're done.

Done?

OK, so here's the postscript:

I was in the kitchen baking some cookies yesterday (as I've been the last several days...) when the doorbell rang, and Tony answered it for a postal service volunteer. She'd read Ben's letter to Santa and brought him a pogo stick! She left too quickly for us to really thank her properly, or send her off with a plate of cookies. The pure generosity of this just knocks me out, and the thought of kids who really might not get a Christmas present without such volunteers makes me tear up (Tony looked up the Toys for Tots website and made a quick donation).

Ben and I hadn't talked about his pogo stick request since the day he mailed his letter to Santa, and I didn't act on it; I didn't really take it seriously. If you have read this blog, or know my boy, you know that Ben is not really a pogo stick kind of guy. But last night Ben made a careful plate of cookies, carrots (for the reindeer) and wrote a note for Santa: "Dear Santa, I hope your trip goes great tonight! PS, Did you bring my pogo stick? Signed, Benjamin James Grant."

Of course, he was delighted with the gifts we gave him (his own set of measuring spoons; a compass; about a thousand Lego pieces) but his face when he recognized the big package under the tree this morning was pure joy, and he has not stopped marveling that Santa responded to his letter.

(Image from the book that started this all, Marla Frazee's Santa Claus the World's Number One Toy Expert)

It's beginning to look a bit like Christmas...

We're cooking, and decorating, and generally filling the house with good smells and pretty things... More to come!

Oh, Christmas Tree

This tree, a scrawny little primrose, is making me very happy. We're fostering it for Friends of the Urban Forest, which will reclaim it after the holidays and plant it on a street somewhere in San Francisco (I'm hoping we can get the address, so that we'll be able to visit it). Tony and the boys deemed it too small and skinny to bring inside and decorate, so we have a more traditional Christmas tree in the living room, and this one is hanging out by the front door, adorned with a flock of origami cranes.

Meanwhile, in other Christmas preparations, I've made (with Ben's participation) candied orange peel, Elevator Lady Spice Cookies, pumpkin rocks, cranberry bars, and cranberry-pistachio ice box cookies. We still need to make hickory puffs and bourbon balls, some biscotti, and probably some wasps' nests (a recipe I'll post so that I can help Fertile Ground use up her egg whites!). Plus, there's nothing chocolate yet, and that's just wrong. Finally, I'm considering -- for the first time -- buche de noel for Christmas dessert, which is perhaps a little nutty. Tune in Wednesday to find out!

Salted Chocolate-Pecan Toffee

This was a fine way to end a busy week, or start a busy weekend. Ben and Eli both helped, Ben marveling at how much sugar the recipe called for, and both boys loving the sight of me wearing heavy-duty work gloves when it was time to stir the vanilla into the boiling sugar (somehow we don't have oven mitts). When I asked Tony if he wanted a taste (we'll give most of it away) he said, "Are you kidding? I saw everyone in my family throw a stick of butter into the pot. Yeah, I want a taste." I've never made candy before, but it turns out to be a lot less work than an equal amount of cookies, and needless to say, it's plenty delicious. We might be trying out some more recipes during this holiday baking season. Stay tuned.

Father's Day Reading

Check out all the good Father's Day reading over at Literary Mama, including Libby's column, my column, and one of the new features that we have been working hard on: a reading list!

Antidotes to a Lousy Hour

Luckily, it didn't take much (it was really only an hour, after all, and I didn't even get any bruises) but it was abundantly, extravagantly erased by:

lots of sympathy from family and friends, both in the computer and out

+ a quiet afternoon playing with my boys

+ Saturday morning at the farmer's market listening to a friend's band

+ an afternoon at our friends' new home, making up for the previous day's aborted playdate

+ an impromptu barbecue with three other families (8 kids under 6 all playing easily together while the parents eat and visit)

+ Sunday morning's chocolate-chip coconut coffee cake (happy Father's Day, Tony!)

+ a sunny afternoon at the San Jose Giants game, both watching the game and, when it got too hot, watching the boys play the carnival games in the parking lot

+ another great dinner with friends (two nights in a row being fed by someone else!)

+ another late night, carrying sleepy, sweaty-headed boys from the car up to bed

= a sunny summer weekend with old friends and happy kids and good food

Literary Reflections: Essential Functions

We're celebrating Father's Day all month long over at Literary Mama, including a Literary Reflections essay by Lisa Gates titled "Essential Functions." Here's a blurb:

At 7:30 a.m., as I drive my son to school, he asks, "What are you thinking about, Mom?"

"Oh, lots of things."

My son grins. "You always get that far away look when you're inventing something to write." My heart falls on top of itself. He wiggles out of the back seat and before he slams the door, he says, "You should call Grandpa, Mom."

Click on over to Literary Reflections to read more!

Small Town Livin'

No, we haven't moved out of San Francisco, we just know where to get a dose of small town (and summer weather!) when we (read I) need it: over the bridge and in Marin, where today we joined friends for their hometown pancake breakfast/Memorial Day Parade.

And when a couple enterprising kids rolled by us with their lemonade stand on a cart, you know we made a purchase!

A Perfect Day

6:30 A.M.
With two little kids, I didn't really expect to sleep in. Still, Tony got up with Eli at 6, and I got to keep my eyes closed another half hour, until Ben came thundering down the hall. Sweet guy, he's been waiting to give me my Mother's Day present since he made it in preschool on Friday afternoon, and now he can't wait another minute. We snuggle up in bed to read his card and admire the "garden" of shiny pebbles, feathers, and bits of potpourri pressed into playdoh in a big yogurt lid. I don't have to fake my enthusiasm, even at this hour: I love it.


7:00 A.M.
Tony and Eli bring me breakfast, the Sunday Times, a little gift and another card. Then the big gift: they all leave for two hours while I read the paper, uninterrupted.

10:00 A.M.
We walk over to the park, where we run into a friend with her two girls (her partner's off on a training ride for the SF to LA LifeCycle). We all ride the carousel a while, hopping from animal to animal.

noon
Eli falls asleep on the stroll home and miraculously transfers to nap in the crib. Tony, Ben and I eat lunch on the sunny deck.

1 P.M.
Tony (who's fighting a cold) takes a nap; Ben plays lego while I get ready for my reading.

4 P.M.
We meet up with my writing group at the Nomad Cafe in Berkeley. The microphone's set up in the children's play area, so our kids lounge on big cushions, look at picture books and play with Exo-Bonz at our feet while the 6 of us take turns reading from our work. It feels just like our bi-weekly meetings!

6 P.M.
Pizza dinner with most of the writing group at one member's house. Eli can't believe his luck: we're letting him play with marbles (he's almost old enough to deal with choking hazards; besides, I figure, most of these are small enough to go through). Ben discovers the trains just as we're about to go, but is lured away by the promise of a stop at a friend's house.

9 P.M.
We're finally heading home, the boys delirious from playing with their two friends. Ben falls asleep when we're halfway home; Eli, wired, can't stop talking. By the time we get home, he's sighing "Mama, mama, mama!!" like a little drunk. And falls asleep after three minutes in the crib. I'm not far behind.

A Feminist Bunny

The Easter Bunny brings books to our house along with chocolate, and this year I got a sweet Margaret Wise Brown story, Home for a Bunny, for Eli and then finally remembered to get one of my childhood favorites for Ben, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.

When I was little, I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes Easter egg logistics that this book details: the "fact" that there are five Easter bunnies; how bunnies are chosen to become Easter bunnies; the palace stacked with Easter eggs, carefully sorted by color, style, and flavor.

As an adult, and as a parent, I appreciate the feminist message in this seventy year-old story. The Country Bunny is told that she'll never be an Easter bunny because her 21 children take up so much her time. And it's true, she says, that as babies they do keep her completely occupied. But then they grow, and she teaches them to run the house, assigning pairs to cook and clean and garden and even to dance and paint, to entertain the bunnies doing more "necessary" chores. We're shown, in fact, that mothering gives her skills that make her more qualified to become an Easter bunny than she might have been otherwise.

All of this is very gently conveyed, not at all beating the reader over the head with its message, for which I am grateful. But the thing that gets me is, why does the Country Bunny need to teach her kids to do all this work? She has a husband, we read (he's never shown), which is how she comes to have 21 baby bunnies, but then he falls out of the story and the Country Bunny is effectively a single mother. And so good for her for managing as competently as she does. But of course I wish for a story that shows the daddy bunny staying home with the kids while mother bunny follows her career dreams.

Valentine's Day Ding-a-lings

No, this is not a list of annoying people who insulted me today, as happened one Valentine's Day... Just a picture of the little cakes I wound up making for my boys.

I'd been stymied by the whole insert-cream-into-cake portion of the recipe; my vanilla cream was way too runny to do anything but pour out of a pastry bag (which I don't have any way) or my ghetto pastry bag, a ziploc with the corner cut off. But then I had an inspiration while I was out running today, and came home to wash out Eli's little medicine plunger. It worked like a charm! Plus, it was just kind of fun to squirt vanilla filling into chocolate cake with a plastic syringe.

Oh, and with the cream inside and the ganache on top, they're really not too dry at all. Pretty tasty, in fact.

Four Valentine's Days

Kindergarten: I came home for lunch and my mom mysteriously sent me up to my bedroom to await my meal. Moments later she arrived with cream cheese and jelly sandwiches on white bread (white bread! unheard of!), cut into hearts.

2002: I'm a month from my due date with Ben (but as it turned out, only 2 weeks from Ben), standing in the grocery store's freezer aisle, trying to choose a vanilla ice cream for the brownie ice cream sandwiches I'm making for Tony. A woman walking by looks me up and down and says snarkily, "It's a little late to be counting calories, isn't it?" Cow.

2006: My Valentine's Day dessert does double duty for the Birthday Cake Blog Project I organized to celebrate my sister's 45th. It tastes as good as it looks. (But sorry, Libby, I'm not nearly so organized this year!)

2007: This recipe looked so promising, but to be honest, the cake's a bit too dry, the filling a bit too runny (and why, when a recipe isn't so great, does it make so much? why??). Still, I will coat them all with ganache, they'll taste fine, and there's plenty to share with the preschool staff. Meanwhile, the banner I made (with the hearts Ben cut out to make his valentines) looks just fine. Apparently this year, it's more of an arts & crafts holiday for me.

This Day In History

1781
Richmond, Virginia is burned by British naval forces led by Benedict Arnold.

1884
Princess Ida, written by Gilbert & Sullivan, is first performed at the Savoy Theater in London.

1914
Ford Motor Company sets a precedent by introducing an eight-hour working day and a minimum daily wage of $5.

1925
Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes the first female governor in the United States.

1932
Umberto Eco is born. So is my dad, Christopher Webber--poet, priest, farmer, husband, father-- in Cuba, New York.

1933
Construction starts on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, U.S.A.

Happy birthday, Dad! You're a year older than the Golden Gate Bridge, and you look every bit as strong.

The Spread

Sadly, I didn't think to take a picture of our party buffet (which was happily augmented by a batch of last-minute chocolate croissants, as well as a berry coffee cake, a dozen doughnuts, pear-ginger muffins, chocolate truffles, and white bean crostini brought by guests...) before it became unphotogenic.

However, here's a picture of the other spread the party produced as friends arrived at our no-shoes-in-the-house house.

It was a good party.

Ring out the old...

Recipe for a lovely day:

1 morning playing at home

1 trip to Target for party supplies (and bonus: new party shirts for both kids!)

1 trip to the playground, where the boys demonstrated their new sliding skills: Eli, feet first on his belly down the curly slide; Ben, head first on his belly down the double-bump.

1 dinner at the local Japanese restaurant, where good friends happened to show up just as we were finishing. We visited for a bit, and fed their two boys some of our extra yaki soba.

1 stop for gelato on the way home (it's good to end the year with a taste of something sweet.)

1 quiet pair, stuffing peppers and filling dumplings for tomorrow's party, sharing a half-bottle of champagne and a small box of truffles.

New Year's Cooking

Four or five years ago, Tony and I started holding a New Year's Day party. We can't remember exactly when it began; we could chalk it up to Ben's birth and a sleep-deprived reluctance to stay out late on New Year's Eve, but in fact we'd never been big NYE revellers. It used to be a work night for Tony, back when he ran light shows at dance parties, and he's more than had his fill of drunken party-goers. Meanwhile, my most memorable New Year's Eves had involved arguing with my old boyfriend while we searched Manhattan fruitlessly for the kind of unrealistically glamorous party you see in When Harry Met Sally.

So Tony and I hunker down. Pre-Ben, we'd have people over for a fancy New Year's Eve dinner. One fabulous year, we were in Williamsburg visiting friends. We drank a 1990 Dom Perignon (one of their wedding gifts) and ate homemade napoleon, then stayed up very late watching an Iron Chef marathon.

And now we host a New Year's Day open house. We make a ton of food and invite all our friends and their increasing numbers of kids. Often we are still jet lagged from our Christmas visit east, but we still hold the party. We've carried on when Ben was recovering from pneumonia and also when we'd only been back in our house, post-renovation, for three days and didn't really know where the serving dishes were. One year, New Year's Day brought a huge rainstorm, and my Dad, proud New Englander that he is, watched admiringly as the water rushed down the street, rising high enough to float a canoe.

This year, I started some of the New Year's cooking before we left for Christmas, putting the dough for pistachio-cranberry cookies and cheddar crackers in the freezer. I've baked those (the crackers aren't worth the effort, fyi) and also made brownies, banana-coconut muffins and addictive parmesan-black pepper biscotti (to make up for the lame crackers). We'll make strata (for which I no longer follow a recipe, sorry), and Tony's mini stuffed peppers and shitake mushroom dumplings (two things he's made up, but I'll work on him to write down the recipes), and maybe some gougeres and polenta bites. There'll be candied peel (some plain, some dipped in chocolate) and satsumas and sweet potato fries and lots of different things to drink.

One year toward the end of the party, a friend noticed me rummaging in the pantry for something else to serve. "You know, Caroline," she said, "If you stop putting out food, we'll all go home." But of course, as she well knew, that's not the idea at all! I can't think of a finer way to ring in the new year than by gathering up as many good friends as possible and feeding them well. And to those of you who can't be with us, may the new year bring you peace, happiness, and many good things to eat.