October 1, 2013
How to Feed a Family by Laura Keogh and Ceri Marsh
”Pratt’s postwar-era family table is a site of constant labour, meal after meal–which all fell to Mary, with no foreseeable end.”–Catherine M. Mastin, “Base, Place, Location and the Early Paintings” , from the Mary Pratt book, an excerpt from which appears today on the 49thShelf blog.
It’s a whole new world at our house these days, as I’ve got a 4 month old baby and a kid who has just started all-day school and is usually exhausted by 5pm. So while I am still a decent cook who makes dinner from scratch every night, I find many of my old standard recipes don’t quite work anymore. I need dinners that are quick, healthy, with minimal preparation (because heaven forbid the baby lets me put her down). I need dinners that my big kid will eat, even with her kiddish tastes, and oh yes, they need to be delicious, because I’m going to eat them too.
Enter How to Feed a Family by Laura Keough and Ceri Marsh, a book which couldn’t have come around at a better time. The first meal I made was shakshuka, a tomato egg dish for which I really did have all the ingredients already in my pantry. We got home at 6 that night, and I had to go out again at 7:15, but it all came together, and even Ol’ “I Don’t Like Tomatoes” Harriet ate hers up fine. Here, I thought, is a cookbook that does what it says on the tin.
We’ve had the ridiculously easy and tasty Lemon Linguini (though I threw in some spinach to up the greens), apple chicken curry (which we all enjoyed), tilapia tacos with fresh lime, though everybody’s favourite has been the so-simple sweet potato macaroni and cheese (which I particularly like because it makes a huge batch, and I freeze half for later). I have baked the whole-grain blueberry muffins three times now, and the whole play school is having them for snack tomorrow. I’ve stolen sandwich ideas (chicken and grapes. Yum!), made breakfast milkshakes, and we had cornmeal pancakes for lunch one day, which were terrific.
How to Feed a Family is a product of the blog Sweet Potato Chronicles, from which I’ve scooped recipes from time-to-time and for which my friend Athena writes a lovely column called “A Quick Bite With”. Reflecting its origins, the book is a bit of a mishmash and guided mainly by its writers’ tastes instead of a grander scheme. So you end up with a cannelloni recipe with a whole page of ingredients with another recipe calling for store-bought pastry shells (gasp! horror! says me). And they’re really, really into spelt flour and brown rice syrup, which I just don’t happen to have on hand. Further, my child wouldn’t touch an asparagus/tomato frittata with a ten foot pole, but that’s my problem (and it is. Because when she doesn’t eat her share, I eat it instead, which is a problem I don’t expect is come across by the book’s authors, two former fashion magazine editors who’ve probably long-learned the art of restraint).
I am not completely the target audience for this book–I’ve got my own ideas about food and cooking and I dare their recipe for wholewheat pancakes to compete with mine, which I fry up every Sunday (blueberry banana!). But I’ve also never needed a book like this so bad in my life, and the spine is already way cracked. The pages splattered.Here is a cookbook that’s made to get used, and I am having an awfully good time with it.
September 24, 2013
The Hang of It
My new office.
Now that we’re nearly three weeks into our brand new life, I’m going to take the risk of saying out loud that we might be getting the hang of it. After a very bumpy first week, Harriet is very happy to be in Junior Kindergarten, and has already acquired some brand new skills, such as being able to sit down and focus on a project for more than two minutes, and also the ability to draw something that actually resembles a thing. She is also enjoying being back at her play school in the afternoons. Stuart is back to work, and quite happily now that we’ve learned he’s got a promotion and begins a new position next month. He’s also taking a college course he’s finding very inspiring, which means I am home alone on Wednesday nights.
The first Wednesday night was surprisingly good–I had two crabby kids and a heat wave, so we all jumped in the bath and had a pool party in the tub. Somehow, I managed to drown no one, we had dinner, *and* I mopped the floor, so I got to feel like Mommy Awesome. There was to be no repeat the following Wednesday, however, as the baby proceeded to cry unceasingly and the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. We’ll see how I do tomorrow.
Regarding Iris, who is 3.5 months old: we thought we’d been doing so well tolerating her poor sleeping habits, and then she went and showed us that we’d not seen nothing yet as poor sleeping goes, and so now I’m kind of the walking dead. This time, however, we know it’s a problem to be endured instead of something that we can fix, and so we just tolerate the tireds without feeling badly about the whole thing, and that makes a huge difference. She has a cold and has just got her second tooth in, which isn’t helping matters, plus she is a *baby* and we know what they’re like.
What they’re like though is pretty easy compared to 4 year-olds, which I didn’t appreciate at all the first time. I also think that when I was home with Baby Harriet, I was terrifically bored, but now I’ve got commitments and deadlines, and things to get done with Baby lying on my chest. There is no time for boredom, and so Iris rolls around on the floor while I do my work, and I really am accomplishing so much, though I am having to also train myself to type with one hand while the baby screams in my other arm. In the mornings, she falls asleep soon after I drop off Harriet at school, and so I can’t go home because our apartment is up a flight of stairs and I’ve got her in the stroller, so I go to RedFish BlueFish instead and work for the 30 minutes she manages to stay asleep for. (Iris has about six naps a day, 20-40 minutes. This would bother me, except I had another baby like that once before, and everything worked out fine.)
And the very best thing we’re up to these days is that we started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which Harriet and I are both encountering for the very first time. And we love it. I’m reading it aloud and once in a while get a sense of where possible criticism comes from, but these criticisms would mainly be about there being too many adverbs, or that characters “hiss” sentences which are not sufficiently sibilant, which are the kind of criticisms you really have to go looking for and be an asshole to make.
March 8, 2013
I am not a very complicated creature
It’s often around this time of year when it becomes most clear to me that I am not a very complicated creature
. Basically, make the sun shine and all challenges seem conquerable. Today I dropped Harriet off at school and walked home without my hat on, there is more grass than snow on the ground, and we passed a woman who was walking down the street, sans mittens, reading a book. Even if I hadn’t spent the last week and a half much obsessed with the enormous lump upon my neck and riding an emotional roller coaster, I would still be finding this day to be one infused with hope and possibility. Even if I hadn’t spent the last week and a half much obsessed with the enormous lump upon my neck and riding an emotional roller coaster, I would still have found plenty to complain about during this time because these lingering winter weeks pre-spring are pretty brutal, and it would be around now, the no-hat day, when I start thinking that maybe everything is going to be survivable after all.
The thing about emotional roller coasters though is that they’re not very stable. I’ve had a couple of good days in the past week or so during which I’ve thought that I’ve got a handle on everything, only to find myself profoundly disappointed the next day when all outcomes seemed quite terrifying again. (Interestingly, these next days were always grey and dreary.) For anyone who has had a life in which things have happened, this will not be all that surprising, but as I tend to spend most of my time at home and contented, delighted with pouring tea from a red teapot, I’m not so used to twists and turns. I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the idea that today’s spring-time high is going to have to be come down from at some point. I am looking forward to having my husband on holiday next week and all the fun things we’re going to get up to, but then there is a biopsy in the middle of that week and I think that the wait for results will drive me out of my mind, spring or no spring. I am so afraid of that phone call.
But I am also looking forward to Thursday, the day after the biopsy, because I have a midwife’s appointment and near-constant kicks in the ribs make me quite confident that Baby is thriving. I want to go to the midwife’s, that wonderful place where all is so healthy and normal. I now find myself longing for the baby’s birth, in a way I never thought I would due to my slight aversion to newborn people. I am no longer dreading all the trauma and turmoil of birth and a new baby because it’s healthy, normal trauma and turmoil. I want to be out of my mind because it’s four a.m. and my nipples are chapped. Who ever would imagined that anything would bring me to this point. Twists and turns indeed; life is funny.
But in light of the sun’s shine, life also seems very good. Is it embarrassing to disclose how much I am enjoying reading On the Banks of Plum Creek with my family each evening, and how inspired I am by Charles and Caroline Ingalls’ courage? We will get through this, neck lumps, grasshopper plagues, chapped nipples and all. There are more sunny, wonderful days to be had.
February 15, 2013
Valentines Aftermath
I really do love my Valentine. Our plan was to celebrate tonight with dinner out and tickets to “Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craigslist Cantata”. It has been a wild week, what with the excitement of the book deal announcement, me finishing a draft of another project that has owned my life for the past six weeks, and the most atrocious day of parenthood on Wednesday that left me in tears and in despair at what we’d wrought on the world by delivering it this child. I’m starting to lose my second-trimester thunder, and fatigue is creeping in–my midwife appoints now becoming biweekly! Terrifying! Further, it ocurred to me suddenly on Wednesday evening that it is February, which never really kicks in until halfway through but when it does, the month is hard to beat. February can make everything seem quite unbearable, no matter how much loveliness is going around. Once I realized it was February though, everything seemed better. It wasn’t all me after all.
We’ve been in the market for new bedroom furniture, a queen-size bed in case the new baby decides to bunk in with us, because a double bed doesn’t cut it for such things, plus I recently found the receipt for our mattress which we bought in 2005 when we were so so poor and it cost us $200! (I remember at the time thinking it was very expensive, and so it’s no surprise that it’s not holding up so well 8 years later.) This week, I found a Craigslist ad from a woman who was selling her entire bedroom suite for a very reasonable prize, so we booked the Autoshare Cargo van (and a babysitter) and went to pick it up last night. Not a very romantic Valentines, we supposed, carrying a bedframe, two bedside tables, and two dressers out of a condo building, and then up the two flights of stairs into our bedroom. But now we had a bedroom suite! Furniture that matches! I never imagined such a thing was even a possibility. We still have to buy a boxspring and a new mattress, our house is in complete disarray, and if anyone wants to pick up a bed that my mom bought at a farm auction in 1976, I’m your man! But we love the new furniture.
We hauled the furniture inside, and supposed the worst of the night was done, but it actually turned out to be just the beginning. Harriet woke up screaming with a problem I’m not going to get into, but google searches provided no answers, and so we opted to take her to the hospital. We were only there for two hours, but as ever, a trip to the Hospital for Sick Children provides enormous perspective ie the child in line ahead of us whose parents feared was rejecting her transplanted liver. It was the first of all our annual visits to the hospital too where I wasn’t imagining terrible scenarios that would require us to be in the hospital for weeks at a time. I knew she was fine. Our visit was unpleasant, but to be borne (so bravely by our little one too), and we were home in two hours. Walking out of that place with my healthy girl in my arms remains the greatest luxury of my entire existence, even more so than matching bedside tables.
Anyway, my point was that from a tactical standpoint, our Valentines Day was a romantic disaster. Worst night ever. But it wasn’t, actually, because we were in it together, hauling enormous dressers or entertaining Harriet in the waiting room with a pen and an elastic band. As I said to my beloved Valentine this morning, “There is not a road that I wouldn’t be willing to walk down with you.”
January 29, 2013
Welcome to our new arrival!
Life has changed forever in our home since the delivery of our newest household member on Saturday morning. Labour was a breeze, performed by two strong men who apparently carry appliances up rickety staircases and install them in attics all the time. And thereafter we fell upon gazing at it, unable to get over the beauty, the shine, the rocket-ship-ness. It plays music when its cycle is completed. Our previous washing machine was so old that when we asked our landlord to replace it, she reminisced that she’d used it to wash her kids’ diapers, and her kids are now in high school. Our old washer was Shirley Jackson eccentric, and it had a dial, but the label had worn off so we could never tell what the setting was, and there only seemed to be one setting anyway which mainly involved the washing machine dancing across the floor, and leaving the clothes inside not only not clean, but usually ripped. And don’t get me wrong–it was better than nothing. And certainly better, being close at hand, than the washing machines at the laundromat on Harbord Street which I’d frequented before we moved here, having to queue, and then remove other people’s manky underpants before using the machine for myself. But now this is a brand new washing machine, and it’s never known any manky pants but my own. When the clothes come out, they’re so clean you can feel it, and they’re nearly dry from the spin. And only a few months down the line, when I’m up to my ears in cloth diapers, will my love for this machine fully blossom. I’m almost excited about it. Almost.
May 1, 2012
The new bunting is here.
I know you’ve been waiting on tenterhooks, but no longer: the new bunting is here! The bad news about this is that no longer are we awaiting bunting in the post, which is a glorious state of being, but at least we get to have our bunting and hang it too. The new bunting was purchased to replace the old bunting, which I’d handmade from origami paper, scotch-tape and a piece of yarn, and was in a rather sorry state. For the new bunting, we went upscale and outsourced it from one with my craft skills than have I. And I’m totally in love with it, just as expected. No longer do we have shabby bunting to be ashamed of, and the best part of the bunting life, of course, is that each day is a celebration.
January 8, 2012
This kid blows my mind
This kid blows my mind. I’ve been writing snarky comments on my Facebook wall about parents of “gifted” children, but naturally, I do suppose that Harriet is the funniest, most brilliant child the world has ever seen before. Basically, she is Jesus (who we know all about from the Dick Bruna Christmas Book).
Though we’ve had to stop borrowing Thomas DVDs from the library because Harriet is too obsessed, and has been talking about the episode where James fell in the mud for three weeks now. And she informed us that she’s changed her name to Harriet Tank Engine, her baths are “wash-downs” and she calls her bed her “round-house”. But it’s not just all cartoons, she’s also political: yesterday when The House came on CBC radio, Harriet listened for a moment and said, “They’re talking about Canada. I live in Canada.”
She can recite Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Miss Muffet, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and Night Before Christmas. She’s totally potty trained, except that she’s afraid of toilets so still has to wear diapers outside of the house. She likes to coax us into playing her games by telling us, “It’s very good game, very fun” but then she yells at us when we do it wrong and the game is always pretty boring. Every day around 1:00, she decides it’s naptime and goes to bed on her own accord (which has only started since we ditched the crib), sleeps for two hours, then gets up and sings or reads in bed for about a half an hour more. She sleeps until 9:00 on the weekend. She eats sushi, pesto, felafels, blue cheese and hummus, and is quite particular about where she gets her croissants. (This is the kind of thing we parents brag about who have too much disposable income for our own good, and live in the city.)
She loves Chicken Pig and Cow, Katie-Morag, Curious George, The Berenstain Bears, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, Jon Scieszka’s Trucktown books, the letter H, chocolate, watching DVDs, getting mail, and when it’s garbage day. She displays that marvelous imagination that seems to be innate in all her peers (and where does that go? Why do so many of us lose it?) . She likes to help me bake and sometimes is even helpful. Lately, she’s been asking for definitions of words she doesn’t know: “What means ‘on purpose’?” This afternoon she wondered why there was only one cloud in the sky, and if it was lonely.
So yes, now she is two (and a half!), clever as clever. And I really hope she is two forever and ever. Really. Because there’s never been anything quite as marvelously good. We love her.
January 5, 2012
We are pretty impressed with ourselves
Stuart is excited because he built the walls, I am excited because I was the visionary of the floor, and Harriet (who hasn’t seen and/or broken the finished product yet, because it was completed after her bedtime) was pretty enthuasiastic about the opportunity to eat some white glue.
Thanks to Ruth Ohi for the inspiration.
December 31, 2011
Fewer sweets not going so well
Next year, I was going to eat fewer sweets, but then I received a Kitchen-Aid Professional Stand-Mixer for Christmas, so it really doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. I am consoling myself, however, with the realization that I’ve achieved both my 2011 goals, which were to read Great Expectations and finish a draft of my novel manuscript. I have read 132 books this year, and have also been successful at reading through my to-be-read shelf (and putting them in alphabetical order has made all the difference in the world, by the way) and I’m on the Ps. I vow to never let such a pile-up occur ever again. In 2012, I am going to finally finish reading John Cheever’s collected short stories, and write a brilliant second draft of my novel. I am also going to restrict myself to blogging 3 days a week in order to make time for other kinds of writing.
This time last year, I had just finished up a fulfilling creative year, but had no idea but 2011 would have in store. And to think that it would include a National Magazine Award nomination and publication in a book would have been nearly too much to wish for, and so I am pretty grateful for those opportunities, as well as writing gigs with some great publications, and my work at Canadian Bookshelf and Uof T. In addition to my novel, I’m at work on a couple of other interesting projects, and would also like to publish some short fiction this year, though perhaps it’s too much to wish the cup be eternally runneth over.
Speaking of cups runneth over (or at least bowls), we’d been planning on a chocolate fondue to bring in the new year tonight, but then our neighbour who’s departing on vacation brought over the contents of her fridge, and now it looks like we’re going to have to make a clafoutis as well. So I really mean it when I say that we’re doing poorly on the fewer sweets thing, but if that’s my biggest problem, we’re really doing all right.
Happy New Year and all the best for 2012.
