A Shocking Development: Sunday Morning French Toast

I don’t want to brag, but yesterday morning I made French toast. On a whim. From scratch, using a recipe I spontaneously found on weelicious. While my husband—fearless cook and all-around unflappable father—was out of town. P. sat on the counter in her pajamas and helped me crack two eggs into the bowl and whisk them together with cinnamon, honey, milk, and almond milk. I didn't panic when I had to pluck eggshell bits out of the batter (my fault, not hers) but simply carried on, improvising cheerfully, channeling Steve. Kids are uncanny conduits of our emotions, as I'm starting to figure out, but P. didn't bat on eye. She just chewed on a chunk of semi-stale Ciabatta and watched studiously as I dunked half a dozen pieces in the batter and lay them casually in the pan, as though I did this every Sunday morning, as though it wasn’t some supreme feat to make a hot breakfast out of thin air. Meanwhile, M wheeled around in her little activity go-cart, banging into cabinets and dogs like a drunken underage driver, squeaking her giraffe and drooling with amazement. (Either that, or else she was teething.) For the first time since I started trying to learn to cook, I was actually relaxed in the kitchen. A shocking development! Everything about the scene felt freakishly sane and normal and, dare I say, easy. The French toast was crispy on the outside and soft but not soggy on the inside, just the way I like it, and as the three of us sat down to eat our breakfast, everything felt just about right. As they say, fake it 'til you make it. 

Echo

At your suggestion I dove into Poser. And, while I am only on the second chapter, I can already see how it mirrors my own life, living back at home amongst concentric circles of complicated family and friend relationships. Rallying against the liberal, know what’s best for your child by ingesting organic only foods child-rearing, following a code of mommy ethics that cloaked in freedom harbor restrictions. And I feel myself wonder, how did you know not to move back east once you and Steve began having babies? What innate wisdom did you acquire that I lack(ed)? Deep breath. It feels too surreal like an echo of my current life, and I am only on Chapter Two, do I brave the rest?

Peter is traveling again amongst the mountain ranges of Utah verses in the back country of Canada showing clients the wind farms that are already built and that will be built. And I find I am struggling with my old friend, anger. She seems to come out in the morning and at night when my resources or time is limited. She comes in the form of having to ask my kids repeatedly to do something. “Please get your pajamas on. Please get your pajamas on. Please get your pajamas on. Please don’t make me ask again. I am getting angry. Please will you get your pajamas on???” Boiling point hit, voice rises. Boys respond. I feel horrible. Outcome achieved but at a price.


So I ask how can I break this pattern and create a healthier one…as I write this the only thing that pops into my mind is trying to take the rush out of things and add humor—ok so that is two things. But come on, what else do you implore when you are well, imploring? When the echo of your requests rings so loud you can almost transport yourself to a canyon you're hiking and the sound of your voice reverberates off the walls.

Picture from our New Year's Day Hike 2011 with our families just outside of Santa Fe, NM

So my plea tonight? Resources please…how do you request something when the first request goes unnoticed by your child and your exhaustion at the situation is hitting a boiling point? Resources please!

Mix & Blend

I’m crossing tasks off my nesting check list. Or as my father-in-law calls it my “honey-do-list, honey do that, honey do this”…and to Peter’s credit he has responded with grace knowing that this is part of the process when a baby is nearing arrival. So last night after K.’s 2nd birthday celebration, aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins departed, kitchen cleaned, kids bedded, I asked him to paint the fireplace; he did. I asked him to hang pictures on our bare walls, again check. And while I would have pushed my luck during past nesting phases, and asked him to do more no matter the hour, I recognized when enough was enough. And we stopped and sat on the couch and enjoyed the dwindling fire that was burning as I sat next to my husband feeling hormonal overload, weight overload (I’m feeling larger than I have with any other baby—and my brother asked if I was positive I was not having twins this go around, not helpful), and an overall lacking of beauty. Yes, my hormones trumped me last night! They ruled reason, reality, and my immediate future.

With my nesting urge has come urgency for healthier foods. So I have traded in my caffeine craves for smoothies! Katie said I had to share after emailing the recipes to her. I agree! These energy boost recipes are just too good to keep to myself. And if it weren’t for my friend, Marty, who said she has swapped her afternoon latte for the green machine, I never would have tasted the deliciousness that follows, and kudos to my girlfriend, Catherine, who says that the secret ingredient to any smoothie is a banana for taste and texture—she is right!

Green Machine Smoothie•    half an avocado
•    1 granny smith apple
•    1 cup packed spinach
•    1 cup ice
•    1 1/4 cup pear juice or white grape juice I did pear
•    I added 1 banana per Catherine’s sage advice mentioned above.

Super tasty and energizing!!! My boys and Peter loved this one and we ate it with popcorn and watching our Friday night movie in our bed. Movie is a loose term for a half hour on demand show they get to watch before bedtime only on Friday nights…we all snuggle, watch, and laugh before tuck-ins. As a family we anticipate Friday night Family Night, but I digress. 

Yesterday morning I tried another smoothie recipe and both Peter and the boys declared this one even tastier. Personally, I find I feel a larger energy boost from the Green Machine recipe above, but this is a pretty darn good boost!

Pom-berry Banana Smoothie
•    1 orange peeled
•    1 cup berries frozen or fresh. I used blueberries and strawberries
•    1 banana
•    1 cup pomegranate juice
•    1 cup ice

So whether you are nesting and expecting another chick and need to get through the late afternoon hours without a second latte, or are just trying to keep yourself going with good food I invite you to mix & blend the above and send us your smoothie favorites!

All Over the Map

sorta wish he'd remembered to bring this along

Steve left yesterday at 3:30 A.M. for British Columbia. His journey took him to Denver, then Calgary, then Golden. As I write this, he’s on a helicopter bound for Fairy Meadows, a backcountry ski hut in the Adamant Mountains that’s run by the Alpine Club of Canada.  

And while I’m thinking of him, in the high northern Rockies, surrounded by snow fields and open bowls and mountains that shoot up to the sky, I’m also thinking about me—about where I might have been today: on a plane to St. Paul, the girls in tow, to see my friend Elizabeth. When I pictured staying here in Santa Fe, on my own for a 10-day solo parenting marathon, I began to panic and immediately thought about getting out of town, taking our gong show on the road and inflicting our chaos on a dear friend. 


But as much as I wanted to go, something about leaving didn’t feel right. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy the plane tickets. After decades of chronic waffling, I’m finally beginning to figure out that when I feel so indecisive, it’s a signal I need to look deeper into what’s making me hesitate. Turns out, when I really peeled away the layers, that going to Minnesota felt sort of like running away: shirking some kind of epic test of maternal skill and unflappability and dragging my girls into my own panicky drama when all signs suggest that after so many months of travel, they really just need to stay put right now.

So here we are in Santa Fe at the end of day two, the night house quiet, the dog snoring, a storm moving in from the west. I’m thinking also about my father, and about Mexico—where we’re meeting my step mom and my dad’s closest friends in a few weeks—and how strange it will be to arrive at the airport and not find him there waiting for us, hiding behind some pillar with a silly grin on his face, ready to jump out and surprise us. My father is still so three-dimensional in my mind. He has not yet faded into a picture of my father, a wavy old snapshot of someone you used to know and love but can’t quite bring to mind anymore. He is still my father—with height and girth and green-flecked eyes and those crazy ragg wool socks he wore everyday, winter or summer—as though at any moment, he will walk out of my memory and back into my regular life. As though I haven’t lost him for my whole life, just for a little while, and once the novelty of him dying has worn off, he’ll come waltzing back to us, camera bag slung over one shoulder and that same old grin, always. 

So I am all over the map tonight, trying to stay positive and open in my heart. That’s what I try to remember when I feel anxious and reactive: to act out of love, not fear. My husband is holed up in a hut with no electricity or cell phone service for the next week, skiing big bowls of unfathomably deep, untracked snow. It does not take a great leap of the imagination to worry. Fear could paralyze me, but I am going to choose love instead. Skiing the backcountry is what Steve loves, and I love Steve, so that’s that. Where is the love? In the Adamant Mountains, skiing his brains out. And right here in Santa Fe, surrounded by friends, with so much to be grateful for. Right where we girls belong.  

cheat sheet taped to my bedpost in case for when I forget

Awake in the Nest

It's official...nesting instincts have kicked in, and the early morning rise has begun. It's 4 am and I can't fall back asleep again. I have tossed and turned and meditated, and finally I relinquish to the fact that even though it is dusk outside and the streetlamps are still lit, all indicators that sleeping hours are still upon me, I am wide awake!

My boys are asleep, my husband is snoring, my dogs are snoozing, and one car has driven down my street, which is curious. In Santa Fe no car would be coming down those red earthen roads except perhaps my husband’s in route to catch a flight in Albuquerque with the moon still out. This time two years ago on this day, the 26th of February I awoke in labor in Beverly, MA with our delightful third son. I was looking at his birth pictures last night and that rush of relief when he was placed on my chest after a few hours of pushing came over me all over again. I am getting excited for that feeling again. It's the birthday of Johnny Cash too, who I think is a creative genius and whom I hope shares some of his spirit with my son born on this day. Goofy thought maybe, but...

Sweet relief, moments after birth, two years ago today.

 L., our second son, just coughed in the other room and it sounds like the croup. He used to get that all the time as a babe.  I hope it is not.

As part of my nesting I feel this urgency to decorate our home, to really make it ours. I don't want to run out and buy the things I want to create one of a kind originals like this. Don't fret I will not start making felted creations as promised. But I do feel the need to create and inspire my space. Perhaps this is what I will begin doing when the rooster crows at 4 am and sleep is nowhere to be found for me.

Recipe of the Week: Clueless Cook's Roast Chicken

A couple months ago I decided to teach myself how to cook. I gave myself a reasonable goal: one recipe a week, any recipe. This week I made roast chicken. When we were kids, my mother roasted a chicken every Sunday night: sizzly brown and crisp on the outside, juicy inside. My sister Amy and I would gnaw on the legs. This was in the early 80s, before supermarket rotisserie chickens were invented, which are good in theory but are usually cold and dried out by the time you eat them. I missed my mother’s chickens: plump and smelling up the whole house like homemade love.

not too shabby

I imagined roasting a chicken to be a fraught, complicated endeavor, one involving lifting up flaps of rubbery, puckery poultry skin to remove certain tiny organs and stuff other things inside. Raw chicken makes me queasy and fiddling with an entire dead bird seemed unsavory to say the least. 

I spent weeks trolling for a recipe, boycotting anything that used verbs like “basting” or “trussing” or required me to tie twine around knobby chicken ankles. No thanks—I know my limits. But I did want to cook rosemary potatoes around the roast—this was the way my mom did it, and it was the one dish I knew how to make before I started trying to cook. The recipe I found, in Parents’ magazine, sounded simple enough, with a jolly little emblem promising “It’s a snap!” 

Rosemary and Garlic Roast Chicken with Potatoes:

• 1  4- to 5-lb.  whole chicken
• 4  cloves  garlic, cut into slivers
• 3  to 4 sprigs  fresh rosemary
• 1  tsp.  olive oil
• 1/4  tsp. each  kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 8    tiny new red or gold potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
•   Salt

1. Heat oven to 400°F. Pat the chicken dry inside and out with paper towels. Remove giblet package, if present. Using a paring knife, make a few small cuts in the thickest part of the chicken legs and insert a garlic sliver into each. Being careful not to tear it, use your fingers to gently separate the skin from the breast meat; slide a few slivers of garlic under the skin. Place the remaining garlic and the rosemary sprigs in the chicken cavity. Rub olive oil all over the chicken and sprinkle with kosher salt and pepper. Place chicken in a roasting pan or heatproof baking dish.

2. Roast, uncovered, for 15 minutes. Add the potatoes to the pan or dish; sprinkle lightly with salt and toss to coat. Continue roasting for 15 minutes more. Stir potatoes. If chicken is browning to fast, cover loosely with foil. Roast another 30 to 40 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer registers 170°F. in the breast or 180°F. in the thigh and potatoes are tender, stirring potatoes once more during cooking.

3. Remove pan or dish from oven and let stand 10 minutes.

The first lesson I learned is not to go shopping at Whole Foods at 5:30 on a Sunday evening if you are planning to roast the chicken that very same night. You will not be dining until at least 8:30 P.M. And novices, don’t try to season a raw chicken while simultaneously fixing two small, hungry children their supper. 

While I put P. to bed, Steve beat me to the dirty work, patting the bird with paper towels and fishing out the tidy little bag of giblets. “Here’s the heart. Here’s the liver!” he announced as he tossed them into the snapping jaws of dogs. I got up my nerve and shoved some garlic into the cavity—slippery and a little ominous, like feeling around the garbage disposal to pluck out a spoon. But I was too lazy and squeamish to slice into the leg, so I scattered the remaining garlic slivers, along with the rosemary Steve picked from our winter herb garden, across the top of the bird instead.

Into the oven went the bird. Soon the whole house began to smell of herbs and chickeny goodness. When the buzzer rang, Steve jabbed his meat thermometer into one leg: 175—definitely done. "The juices are clear!" I practically shouted. I’d read somewhere that that was a good sign. Steve arched his eyebrows, like that was the strangest things he'd ever heard come from my mouth. 

The potatoes were soft but only just beginning to brown, whereas the chicken skin was sizzling and toasty cashew in color, just like Mom’s. I was so excited I forgot to let it rest, whatever that means, and Steve went after it with the carving knife before I could bask in my own glory.

But if the chicken looked pretty, it tasted even better: so juicy and moist, it was almost a caricature of itself. And hot—positively piping. No question, this bird was in a different league than rotisseries. I wished the potatoes were crispier, but I’m not sure how to get around that without overcooking the roast. Maybe next time, while the chicken is “resting,” I’ll crank up the oven to broil. 

We served it with a simple spinach salad—a staple at our house—and even after we both went back for seconds, we still had an entire Tupperware of leftovers to last all week. Yum.

My Confidant

"She believed she could so she did."

This was the quote painted on canvas on the window ledge in front of me at prenatal yoga this morning. I was back at Blooma, where I went when I was pregnant with K., our third. This small sign struck me then. However, it sunk in differently now, pregnant with our fourth-- as I contemplate home or hospital birth, as I believe in my powers as a birthing mama more and more with my doula work, as I grow as a writer with larger dreams and deep rooted stories to share, I realize it comes down to a core word: Confidence. Confidence and belief that what I set my intention upon can and will manifest. An internal confidence that radiates out, that informs my decisions, how I use my energy, and what I tend to daily. So today I offered up my yoga practice to confidence. And let that confidence soar off my mat to those in my life that need it—so, I offer to you the gift of confidence that you have all it takes to get through these days of solo parenting and whatever else may come your way.