It’s been a long, dry spell. Many Catholics have never gone this long without receiving the Eucharist since before their first communion.
Now that more and more parishes are finding ways to safely offer public Mass or some form of communion service, many Catholics are taking to social media to describe what an overwhelming emotional experience it has been for them. Some are even sharing photos of themselves with tear-stained cheeks, overcome with emotion after receiving communion again.
Much of this emotional response is surely sincere, a spontaneous outpouring of joy and gratitude after a time of trial and deprivation. It’s understandable to want to share our delight in the Lord with people who will understand.
So let’s set aside the question of how spiritually healthy it is to take and share selfies of pious displays, and look instead to Catholics who aren’t coming to pieces over the opening of churches.
There are a lot of them. There are a lot of Catholics who most certainly want to return to the sacraments, but they aren’t feeling wracking pangs of longing as their separation continues.
They aren’t spending their days in misery and distress, ceaselessly imploring the Holy Spirit to open the church doors again. And when they do receive the Eucharist again after a long time away, they aren’t going boneless with spiritual bliss. They believe in the saving power of God with all their hearts, but they’re not getting very emotional about it.
I’m here to tell you that if that’s how it is for you, it’s okay. It doesn’t prove there’s something inferior about your faith. It doesn’t mean you’re lukewarm or spiritually mediocre. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about the sacraments, and it doesn’t mean you don’t understand how precious they are. It might mean any number of things, but it’s certainly not automatically a sign that you’re the wrong kind of Catholic.
Emotions are just emotions. They are not nothing, but they are not the same as faith. Sometimes emotions come to us unbidden from the Holy Spirit. Sometimes they are given to us as a gift. But sometimes…Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Last week, it was snowing. This week, it was in the 90’s, so we went all in with the summer food. No ragrets!
SATURDAY Double cheeseburgers!
We had another long day of lugging rocks, and Damien grilled. I was so hungry, I almost ate my own hand along with the burger, so I didn’t get a picture.
SUNDAY Cumin chicken thighs and chickpeas with lemony onions, pita, and yogurt sauce
We haven’t had this dish for a while! Very popular. Extremely juicy chicken with a fabulous skin, crunchy, flavorful chickpeas, and piquant onions.
The yogurt marinade is just a few ingredients, but you want to set it up early so you can marinate the chicken for at least a few hours. That’s how the chicken gets so juicy and the skin gets so fabulous. Then you can walk away from it for the rest of the day, and throw the chicken and chickpeas on a pan to cook in the oven,
and make the yogurt sauce and lemony onions while it’s cooking.
So much flavor with very little effort. I actually only found the lemons in time to make the yogurt sauce, so I quietly used lime juice in the marinade and the onions, and no one noticed.
MONDAY Grilled meats
We usually have a big family cookout on Memorial Day. Sigh, sigh, sigh. Damien did make his excellent sugar rubbed smoked chicken thighs
TUESDAY Grilled ham and cheese on sourdough, little pickles, cherries
A very fine summer meal. There was some consternation over the fact that I only bought one package of ham, so I offered to have salami in mine, which caused even more consternation. I’m not saying ham and salami are interchangeable, but they’re . . . you know what, I’m not on trial here. I took my plate outside, where only the birds were shouting
WEDNESDAY Caprese chicken sandwiches, fries
Another summer favorite. The tomatoes are improving. I roasted the chicken breasts in olive oil and plenty of salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and I had some sliced provolone instead of mozzarella. We had the sandwiches with ciabatta rolls, tomatoes and basil, chicken, and plenty of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and kosher salt. The pepper has mysteriously disappeared.
Someday, I will make a balsamic vinegar reduction, but on this day, easy was perfect.
It’s so tasty and so easy, but I’m gonna adapt it for the Instant Pot next time I make it. Summer is when I like this appliance the best, because you can make a hot meal without turning the whole kitchen into an oven.
It was too dry, so I glopped in some Goya Culantro Cooking Base. It wasn’t the best beans and rice I ever had, but it was fine. Love the carnitas. Some salsa verde would have made this meal perfect.
FRIDAY
Today I intend to make this mango crumb coffee cake, eggs, and something called “baby cakes,” which seem to be small, round hash browns. The only reason I bought them is because they are called “baby cakes.”
Since I haven’t made dinner yet, I don’t have a picture. But I do have a picture of my menu blackboard.
I can see I’m going to have to start hiding the chalk.
Mix dry ingredients together. Rub all over chicken and let marinate until the sugar melts a bit.
Light the fire, and let it burn down to coals. Shove the coals over to one side and lay the chicken on the grill. Lower the lid and let the chicken smoke for an hour or two until they are fully cooked.
Put potatoes and the three eggs in pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, turn the heat down, cover loosely, and simmer until potatoes are easily pierced with a fork (15 minutes or so)
Drain the potatoes. Fish out the eggs, peel, and chop them.
When they are cool enough to handle, cut them into bite-sized pieces and mix them up with the olive oil.
Add the chopped eggs, celery, onion, and parsley.
Mix together the dressing ingredients and add to potatoes. Salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerate and serve cold.
Cumin chicken thighs with chickpeas in yogurt sauce
A one-pan dish, but you won't want to skip the sides. Make with red onions and cilantro in lemon juice, pita bread and yogurt sauce, and pomegranates, grapes, or maybe fried eggplant.
Ingredients
18chicken thighs
32ozfull fat yogurt, preferably Greek
4Tbsplemon juice
3 Tbspcumin, divided
4-6canschickpeas
olive oil
salt and pepper
2red onions, sliced thinly
For garnishes:
2red onionssliced thinly
lemon juice
salt and pepper
abunchfresh cilantro, chopped
32ozGreek yogurt for dipping sauce
3clovesgarlic, minced or crushed
Instructions
Make the marinade early in the day or the night before. Mix full fat Greek yogurt and with lemon juice, four tablespoons of water, and two tablespoons of cumin, and mix this marinade up with chicken parts, thighs or wings. Marinate several hours.
About an hour before dinner, preheat the oven to 425.
Drain and rinse four or five 15-oz cans of chickpeas and mix them up with a few glugs of olive oil, the remaining tablespoon of cumin, salt and pepper, and two large red onions sliced thin.
Spread the seasoned chickpeas in a single layer on two large sheet pans, then make room among the chickpeas for the marinated chicken (shake or scrape the extra marinade off the chicken if it’s too gloppy). Then it goes in the oven for almost an hour. That’s it for the main part.
The chickpeas and the onions may start to blacken a bit, and this is a-ok. You want the chickpeas to be crunchy, and the skin of the chicken to be a deep golden brown, and crisp. The top pan was done first, and then I moved the other one up to finish browning as we started to eat. Sometimes when I make this, I put the chickpeas back in the oven after we start eating, so some of them get crunchy and nutty all the way through.
Garnishes:
While the chicken is cooking, you prepare your three garnishes:
-Chop up some cilantro for sprinkling if people like.
-Slice another two red onions nice and thin, and mix them in a dish with a few glugs of lemon juice and salt and pepper and more cilantro.
-Then take the rest of the tub of Greek yogurt and mix it up in another bowl with lemon juice, a generous amount of minced garlic, salt, and pepper.
Dr. Peter Sampo has died. He was already white-haired when we met him in the 1980’s, when he had recently founded a new little Catholic liberal arts college in the woods in New Hampshire. It was one of four colleges he founded. Most often, you would see him smiling a broad, genial smile, or gravely, intently listening from under his heroic eyebrows; or else he was throwing his head back and laughing his characteristic Dr. Sampo laugh: HAH-hah-hahhhhh. He loved to sit in the cafeteria, lingering with his teachers and his students, talking and listening after meals until he would stand up, push back his chair, and say, “Well, time to get back to work.”
He founded four colleges, as I said. But it was more than that. Over and over again, he told us that the education he wanted to give us was not for now, but for twenty years from now. That was over twenty years ago, and I remember how we would roll our eyes at his repetition.
And he did have his favorite set of ideas that he would roll out, time and time again, over and over, to class after class of the young people he taught. But he was right. He knew that most of us didn’t then understand or appreciate the richness that he was laying out for us, but he trusted that someday we would. And I do. The things I learned in the school he made are the best, most important things I know, and he did his best to found a school that fostered freedom so his students could learn, if they would. It wasn’t until I started looking around for colleges for my own children that I realized just what an unusual, extraordinary thing Dr. Sampo had built.
He was a hearty, vigorous man, never at a loss for words, never abashed. So many of his students have beautiful stories of his generosity, his gentle kindness, his concern. Apparently he would cook linguine for the whole school; apparently, when he saw that a student in Rome didn’t have much to eat, he quietly gave him a wad of cash. I was not close to him, and I didn’t like everything I saw him do; but I saw him grow kinder and more gentle with age, less willing to overlook sorrow, more willing to stop and find out how he could help. He was willing to adapt and change, even as an old man. What an amazing thing: Willing to change, even as an old man. And tirelessly teaching, and building, and rebuilding.
The college I was at was always in flux, always struggling to make itself into something better, always in danger of collapsing into chaos. Sometimes the college relocated temporarily to a hotel; sometimes the whole student body went to live in Rome, because (the story goes) they couldn’t afford to maintain two campuses at once, and it was more important to be in Rome. Sometimes the campus was home to kittens who hadn’t yet gotten the message that it was a college now, and no longer a barn.
His students dressed well for class, out of respect for each other and for the rock solid curriculum his school offered; and the women’s dressy shoe heels would sink quietly into the soft ground, because the great books were there, but paving was still a plan for the future. I was only vaguely aware at the time what tremendous effort and single-mindedness it must have taken to keep building, to keep breaking new ground, to keep putting food on the table in fat years and in lean, and to keep starting over, tirelessly spreading a rich table of ideas for a new set of freshmen, year after year.
Once there was a morning meeting with the whole student body, and the director of student life announced a new plan for the amorphous dirt parking lot, which was haphazard and dangerous. In the new system, there would be a one-way traffic flow, designed to maximize space and minimize chaos. We were supposed to park head in, diagonally, along both sides of a central oblong. It was a good plan, and it would work, as long as everyone paid attention and did what they were supposed to do.
Dr. Sampo stood up and thanked the student life director for explaining everything and for making such a good plan. Then he said, “It’ll never work,” and he laughed his Dr. Sampo laugh, HAH-hah-hahhhhh.
Imagine knowing what people are like, and forging ahead anyway. Imagine knowing how likely it is that your plans will pan out, and still going through with it, because it is a good plan, and eventually it will be worth it. Maybe in twenty years.
He and Dr. Mumbach came to my house a few years ago so I could interview them for an article. As he passed by the table I had amateurishly restored with leftover bathroom tiles, he rapped it with his knuckles and said, with wonder and delight, “You made this?” As if I had done something spectacular. Much as I wrack my brain, I can’t recall him ever boasting about anything he had made himself.
One more story. When I was at Thomas More, every student did a “junior project” — an intensive, months-long focused study on a single important figure. You were supposed to learn everything worth knowing about the body of work, and then, when your hour had come, you would creep into the library and take a seat at the head of a long, polished table, where all the teachers were waiting. They would ask questions, and you were expected to give a cogent, well-researched answer.
My junior project was on the poet Richard Wilbur. Dr. Sampo, who focused on political science, let the literature professors direct the conversation, but he did insist on bringing up one of the few Wilbur poems I never liked, “For the New Railway Station in Rome.”
He asked me a leading question about the poem, which I veered away from. Then he asked me to recite the final stanzas, which I could not do. Then he asked me to recite the final lines, which, with increasing misery, I also could not do. So he leaned forward and asked, gently but insistently, “Simcha, what does it say over the doors of heaven?” and I bleated out, “HOMO FECIT!” Then he sat back and laughed his Dr. Sampo laugh, HAH-hah-hahhhhh.
Homo fecit: Made by man. When most men would have rested on their laurels, Peter Sampo looked around to see whether he could start building again. He was a great man. No one can number the good things that could rightly bear the words: Peter Sampo made it.
Hello, just popping in to say I must be going. I’ve been writing a metric ton of stuff (I said “metric ton” in an effort to avoid saying “shit ton,” which I feel is vulgar), but it’s all for some mythical future publication date, so the tumbleweeds have been building up here.
I’ve also been doing so much gardening, because I don’t have any babies and I guess I’m just locked into this “must be nurturing” thing; and also May is usually stupid-busy with concerts and plays and graduations and field trips, but this year, it ain’t. So I’m gardening. And I’ve been descending into pool preparation madness, by which I mean digging a circle twenty feet in circumference in soil that is mostly rock, but which cannot have any rock, for the sake of the pool.
So in the meantime, here’s a few things I thought you would like to know!
I don’t know who Blippi is, and I want to keep it that way.
We finished The Magician’s Nephew and are about to start The Wind in the Willows. Here is Benny enjoying Uncle Andrew’s comeuppance:
If anyone cares, we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first, and then we read the rest in whatever order we feel like, as long as The Last Battle is last. You can get worked up over this if you want, but I’d rather go dig rocks.
I almost bought the ground liner that had a picture of an elephant stomping on it, but ultimately went with the one that has a picture of a gorilla stomping on it, because it shows a broken bottle underneath the gorilla not poking through.
Here is a photo of my great grandparents, Zelda and Feivel, my grandmother Hana, and two of my great-uncles, Gosel and Schloima. They left Kiev in 192o or so for the usual reasons (bolsheviks, pogroms). This is the visa photo taken in Bucharest.
Zelda became Jenny, which is my middle name. Feivel became Phillip, which is my father’s name. Schloima became Sammy and, and Gosel became Jerry This one is my grandmother, Hana, who became Anne in Brooklyn:
And here is your face when you had to sell everything you own and leave your home with two children with less than 24 hours notice, and it takes so long to get off the continent, you have a whole other baby along the way, and you still have a whole ocean to get across before you can start your life over:
The story goes that they made their way a boat called the S.S. Madonna, which is lovely. The less lovely part is that someone on the boat told my great grandmother that, if she didn’t shut that baby up, they would throw him overboard. So after they got to Ellis Island, and when the child was growing up, if he ever acted up, his mother would say, “I SHOULD HAVE THROWN YOU OVERBOARD LIKE THEY TOLD ME TO.”
I guess that’s about all that’s new with me. How about you? How are you? Want some rocks? I have rocks.
Oh, one more thing. Here is a video I made for a What’s For Supper? post several weeks ago, but I forgot to upload it. It is me inserting cheese sticks into sausages, and odds are good it will end up on a fetish site within the week.
Holy cow, that was a fast week. We worked hard and ate hard this week.
Wow, that does not sound right.
Well, here’s what we had:
SATURDAY Meatloaf, cheezy weezies
Saturday was big dig day. Dig dig dig!
Why dig? Well, like everyone else, we don’t know what the summer is going to look like, so we went and bought a 20-foot above ground pool! To prepare the ground, you have to make it level, and remove all the rocks from the soil, so nothing pointy or poky makes a hole in the bottom.
Well, as you can see, there are a lot of rocks.
The ground is also not level, so we’re just . . . digging some more. And in some cases, hitting a giant hunk of gneiss with a sledgehammer until it’s flat enough to cover with soil. It’s an immense amount of work, but I am openly, obnoxiously enjoying having the whole family working wholesomely outside together on a project. Eventually we’ll get this done, and then we’ll level it, cover it with sand, level that, put down some foam, then a ground cover, and then POOL. Pool pool pool!
Oh, so I didn’t want to stop digging, so I sent Dora in to make some meatloaf.
Well, approximately. We had lettuce (which I didn’t bother chopping), tomato, cucumber, avocado, hard boiled eggs, bacon, chicken, and some kind of shredded cheese, and some kind of dressing.
You’re supposed to have chives and Roquefort cheese, but nobody was complaining. They were too busy complaining that I only made four pounds of bacon.
You know, I’ve been beating myself up over my careless, slipshod ways because the grocery bills have been so high lately. So high, for like . . . two months now . . . oh. Yeah, right about the time we started having twelve people home 24 hours a day, I started spending more on food. SHAME ON ME.
Next time I’ll get more bacon.
MONDAY Chicken burgers, raw veggies and dip
This picture makes me laugh because at first you’re like, “oh, good for her, look at all the vegetables” and then you’re like “wait, is that a demitasse cup brimming with french onion dip?” Yes, it is, and I licked it clean.
TUESDAY Buffalo chicken salad, hot pretzels
Tuesday I went shopping. This is a great meal to throw together in a short amount of time: Salad greens, buffalo chicken cut into strips, crunchy fried onions from a can, shredded carrots, and either blue cheese or shredded pepper jack.
It’s better with ranch dressing, or buffalo ranch dressing, but it’s also good with whatever you have, if you’re hungry enough.
It says “chicken thighs,” but you can use it on all kinds of meat.
Now let’s talk about rustic fruit desserts!
Rus!
Tic!
Fruit-des-serts!
[clap!clap!clap-clap-clap]
There are a lot of them, with lots of subtle variations, but there are more names than there are variations. You know what pie is. You know what a crumble is. But what about cobbler? What about crisp? What about betty, buckle, slump, and grunt? The answer is: some are oven, some are stovetop, some are steamed, some have streusel, and some are just from Connecticut, so who knows. And honestly, which is more fun? Just quietly knowing something, or looking it up and then insisting your kids stand there and listen while you read out loud about it? I think we know.
I wanted to make something that was just fruity on bottom and sweet and crumbly on top, but I couldn’t find any cornstarch, so I ended up making a buckle, which is a sort of coffee cake with fruit layers. It was quite easy, and pretty delicious. And pretty.
It has a layer of cake, then a layer of strawberry, then cake mixed with sugared rhubarb, then a streusel. We had it with whipped cream on top, because it is Wednesday, my dudes.
When I shared this picture on Facebook, I captioned it “O my chevalier!” It’s okay if you didn’t understand right away that I said that because it’s a buckle. That’s a weird joke and doesn’t make sense. HOWEVER, don’t you think I should write a cookbook in the style of G.M. Hopkins? You’d buy that, right, you weirdo? I could call it Sprungform Rhythm Pans. I could call it Carrot Cake Comfort. I could call it . . . PIED BEAUTY THAT IS MADE OUT OF ACTUAL PIE.
I use my college degree all the time, why do you ask?
THURSDAY Meatball subs
Dora to the rescue again. I was so useless on Thursday, and I’ll tell you why, so you can feel smart. I got up and grabbed my two morning pill bottles, which have my green thyroid and purple blood pressure pills in them. I thought to myself, “Huh, they’re white, that’s weird,” and I swallowed them. Then I thought, “Ooh, I need to call in a refill for these.” So I started calling it in, and then I was like, “Hey, how come these bottles have someone else’s name on them? That’s so weird!”
So yeah, I took someone else’s drugs, for no reason at all. That’s how dopey I was before I started to feel the side effects of someone else’s drugs, which included dopiness. (Luckily, the dopiness and a headache, because of course there had to be a headache, was all that happened.) I can’t explain how I could have come to do something so stupid, but there it is. I’m sure this brain fog will get better as I get older though, HO HO HO HO HO HO HO.
Anyway, here is the meatball sub:
And here is the oven-baked, less-mess meatball recipe:
All I have to say about this is we are now a six extra large pizza family. Five pizzas is enough for dinner, but not enough for people to have cold pizza for breakfast the next day, so now we make six. I’m a good mother.
Mix dry ingredients together. Rub all over chicken and let marinate until the sugar melts a bit.
Light the fire, and let it burn down to coals. Shove the coals over to one side and lay the chicken on the grill. Lower the lid and let the chicken smoke for an hour or two until they are fully cooked.
You can substitute in all different combinations of fruit. Makes two buckles in 9-inch pie dishes. Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream
Ingredients
4lbsstrawberries, hulled and sliced
4stalksrhubarb, stringed and diced
For the cake:
1stickbutter
1-1/2cupssugar
2eggs
2tspvanilla
1Tbspbaking powder
1tspsalt
1/2tspnutmeg
4cupsflour
1cupmilk
For the streusel:
1stickbutter
1/2cupbrown sugar, packed
1cupflour
2tspcinnamon
1/4tspsalt
1tspalmond extract
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 and grease two 9" round pans
To make the cake:
In a bowl, beat together the butter and sugar.
Beat in the vanilla and sugar.
Stir in the baking powder, salt, and nutmeg
Alternate adding in the flour and the milk, a bit at a time. Set the batter aside.
To make the streusel:
Cut the butter into pieces, and then add in the other ingredients, mixing until it is crumby but not pasty.
To put it together:
Spread about 1/4 of the cake batter in each buttered pan.
Spread the sliced strawberries on top of that.
Add the rhubarb to the remaining batter and stir to combine. Spoon the rhubarb-batter mixture over the strawberries in each pan as evenly as you can (it's okay if it's gloppy).
Sprinkle the streusel topping over the batter in each pan.
Bake for about an hour, until the top is a bit browned and a toothpick comes out clean.
5lbsground meat (I like to use mostly beef with some ground chicken or turkey or pork)
6eggs, beaten
2cupspanko bread crumbs
8ozgrated parmesan cheese (about 2 cups)
salt, pepper, garlic powder, oregano, basil, etc.
Instructions
Preheat oven to 400.
Mix all ingredients together with your hands until it's fully blended.
Form meatballs and put them in a single layer on a pan with drainage. Cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes or more until they're cooked all the way through.
Add meatballs to sauce and keep warm until you're ready to serve.
What do we really know about Norma McCorvey? A new documentary premiering Friday about the pro-life celebrity includes some bombshells from what she called her “deathbed confession”: that her pro-life convictions and possibly even her conversion to Christianity were all an act, performed for money.
“I was the big fish. I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and they’d put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say,” Ms. McCorvey said in previews of “AKA Jane Roe.”
Ms. McCorvey, the anonymous plaintiff “Jane Roe” of the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, was initially a pro-choice activist, but after her baptism in 1995, she became a celebrity for the pro-life cause. According to the documentary, she received over $400,000 in “benevolent gifts” from various pro-life organizations. Does her history prove that she only pretended to be pro-life because of the money and fame it brought? Or does it prove that she was only pretending to be pro-choice because that, too, brought her attention and cash?
I suspect the answer is: both, or neither.
“It was all an act. I did it well, too. I am a good actress. Of course, I’m not acting now,” Ms. McCorvey said in the documentary, apparently without irony.
Ms. McCorvey is the classic unreliable narrator, and those who have followed her story are not surprised that this new narrative is emerging three years after her death. She said she was pro-life, but she supported first-trimester abortions; she said she renounced her L.G.B.T. lifestyle but lived with a female companion for decades. She gave varying accounts of how she came to be pregnant with the baby whose abortion she tried and failed to procure, claiming at various times that she was raped, then that she had lied about being raped. She wrote a book called Won By Love, but she was often harsh and aggressive toward her own supporters. Her behavior was erratic, her speech often rambling.
The Catholic author and journalist Dawn Eden Goldstein, who says she met Ms. McCorvey in 2007 at a “40 Days for Life” dinner, recently shared a note she sent to their mutual booking agent, urging him to find her a “minder” who could protect her from fans who plied her with drinks even after she told them she was an alcoholic.
And she was used, consistently, tragically, all her life. She was abused, perhaps raped, uprooted, deceived and manipulated, as well as wined, dined, feted and mythologized by both sides. The fact that she became immortalized by the anonymous name “Jane Roe” is tragically apt. Here is someone who was never allowed to be …Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine.
Probably because it’s so nice to talk about something besides COVID-19, the internet had a lot of fun mulling over the name of Elon Musk’s new baby, which is apparently ‘X Æ A-12’.
I wasn’t able to work up much of a sweat over two eccentric celebrities giving their child an eccentric name. Hey, no one seems to have hired a third world surrogate or a CRISPR technician to assist with the production of the child, and there’s no evidence anyone attempted to legally marry a chandelier or anything. The parents are a man and woman who are in a relationship of some kind with each other. This being the year 2020, that’s as wholesome and normal as it gets.
But the name. In general, I’m opposed to giving children names that are not pronounceable, because . . . why? (I’m also against giving children unusual spellings of common names, which strikes me as the worst of both worlds.)
I’m strongly opposed to giving children names that will automatically put them at a disadvantage with most people, because it’s in any way a joke, or designed to shock or offend. Life is hard enough without having to introduce yourself as Ima Hogg or Judas Panzer Boi or something.
What you name your child says something about you; but more importantly, their name says something to the world about them. They are individuals who exist outside their parents’ sphere, and their name should reflect this.
You’re thinking of buying a trampoline, aren’t you? You should.
Here are some thoughts:
Cons:
Every once in a while, someone’s tooth gets embedded in someone else’s skull and the sound of your child’s femur snapping in half will haunt you for the rest of your days.
Passing truckers will honk at you.
Pros:
It’s really, truly fun for all ages. As long as your neck is strong enough to support your head, you can have some kind of good time on a trampoline, whether it’s gently bopping a little baby up and down, or turning ridiculous back flips designed to freak your mother out, or just gingerly springing up and down like a big gooney gooneybird. Also popular: running as fast as you can in a circle while chasing a shrieking toddler. Optional: pretending you’re on the moon.
It’s a great aid to those “Play with us, Mama!” “games” where you get to lie down. They climb on you and roll around and, because of the motion of the trampoline, they think you’re participating. You can call it the tiger game or the mummy game or the digging up dinosaur game, whatever, as long as you get to lie down in the sun and call it “parenting.”
It is damn near impossible to bounce for five minutes and still be mad when you get off.
There is no better sound than the sound that can float in through the window than the sound of previously surly, gloomy, crabby, sullen kids suddenly shouting and laughing together.
People look hilarious trying to get off a trampoline.
If you are pregnant and want to go into labor, it won’t actually unless the baby is ready; but, again, you look hilarious.
You always know the answer to the question, “What will we do with all these party guests?”
If you’re completely the most amazing parents ever, you will also add a sprinkler and a boatload of water balloons to said party activity.
No little kid can say “trampoline.” “Troppineen,” yes. “Chapoline,” probably. “Boing,” definitely. It’s cute. Cute is good.
Add a trampoline to any formal photo shoot and get instant drama (poofy skirts and long hair are a bonus).
It’s the best possible viewing spot for a meteor shower. You can also rest a little cocktail on your collarbone and pretend you’re watching a meteor shower, as long as it’s not actually pouring rain.
This week, I cleaned a lot and ate a lot, and now you people are gonna hear about it.
SATURDAY Aldi pizza
Since I’m no longer shopping on Saturdays, I decided I had time to tackle The Middle Room, which has four girls in it. I normally pretend the upstairs doesn’t exist at all, but every so often, it demands to be recognized, usually by whispering phrases like “fire hazard” and “child protective services” into my psyche at 3 a.m.
I had the kids take everything downstairs. EVERYTHING.
We did it this way because if I go upstairs to sort, I end up drowning in guilt and throwing up with dust, and the rage and disgust and regret overwhelm me before I get to the bottom of things. So I make them bring the mess to me, and then I have to push through and finish the project no matter how bad it feels, or I don’t get my living room back. Maybe someday I’ll finish a task without deliberately entrapping myself, but not today.
So they lugged everything downstairs in bags and boxes, and they stripped that room like we were planning to move out. Then we moved the furniture, and vacuumed everything, and wiped it all down. Then everything they own got a pass or fail (the older kids were allowed to have crates of belongings that I didn’t personally sort through, as long as they were reasonably contained and didn’t smell of rotten fruit). Then we sorted out what was left and put it all back again.
Guys, we threw out thirteen bags of junk. And we bought a new mattress, and new lights, and new storage tubs and crates and shelves, and new hanging organizers. And a new vacuum cleaner. We finished around 8:45 p.m. The finished bedroom still looks like most people’s “before,” but I’m pleased. And we got our living room back.
Oops, this is a food blog. Well, Damien exerted his husbandly authority and commanded me to let him pick up some frozen pizzas.
SUNDAY Mac and cheese with kielbasa, sausage rolls
Mother’s day! I was showered with truly wonderful homemade gifts and treats, and visited my favorite local nursery to pick out some peonies and lilies of the valley. The original plan was to go on a hike and a picnic, but it was windy and nippy out, so we settled for a picnic in the back yard with strawberries and giant sandwiches Damien made with all kinds of special meats and cheeses, and it was a lovely day all day.
I made my normal mac and cheese (just basically a ton of white sauce with whatever cheese we have lying around melted into it), but added sliced up kielbasa.
As with so many people, more and more of our meals are the result of whatever we could find in the stores, so they are getting weird. I liked the mac and cheese with kielbasa, though. It tasted like exactly what it was.
Last time I made this recipe, I used puff pastry, and that’s a better choice than the phyllo dough I used this time. (This was the very last roll of phyllo dough left over from the time I made baklava for the Dead Theologians Society. Yes, packaged phyllo dough really keeps that long in the fridge.)
These are savory little pastries stuffed with sausage and onions, brushed with egg and topped with “everything” seasoning. They were very tasty, and I was amazed all over again that the kids didn’t want them. They are quite easy to make, and would be great for party snacks, or for when it’s mother’s day and you can make what you like and people aren’t going to be jerks for once.
MONDAY Different Asian meatballs with lime sauce, rice
Last time I mentioned this moderately popular Asian meatball recipe I make
Those meatballs were not great. Also, I had some medium-bad migraine brain and repeatedly confused teaspoons and tablespoons, and also I didn’t read the recipe all the way through, and had put all the ingredients in with the meat, including the ingredients which any feeble minded cat would have known were for the sauce, and weren’t supposed to be mixed in with the meat. So I had to scrape a bunch of wet crap off the meat and start over again.
The sauce was good, though! Eventually! I’ll make the sauce again, with the superior meatballs, once we recover from our unpleasant associations with this meal. I also got it into my head to scrub the hell out of the bathtub on Monday, so the day wasn’t a total loss. Nothing beats good old fashioned Comet.
TUESDAY Hot dogs, fries
I went grocery shopping on Tuesday. My strategy is: a mask to protect other people, my sacred heart necklace to remind me of who I am so I don’t murder anyone, and an extra dose of Buspar to seal the deal. Then I got home and collapsed like a bunch of broccoli and Damien made hot dogs and fries. I feel like there was some vegetable, but that may have been a hallucination.
WEDNESDAY Bibimbap and berry cheese cake
Earlier in the week, I had bribed Corrie with cake-making videos while I braided her hair. She likes the recipes that involve either morbidly peppy blonde ladies who don’t know when to stop, or else extremely together Asian women making deft little movements with specially-shaped spatulas in their little glass bowls, and then boop! They produce a magical raindrop cake with a flower made of strawberries suspended inside. So I got it in my head that we needed to make our own fantastical dessert of some kind. Here is what we came up with (there were two of them):
They were . . . intriguing. Even compelling. And wiggly. All the best desserts are wiggly. We used the no-bake cheesecake part of this recipe, but only because I was going for oven avoidance rather than taste; and for the top, we used clear gelatin sweetened with ginger ale. I’ll include the recipe for how we made the Jell-o part, mainly because I went to the trouble of writing it up.
The graham cracker base partially fell apart because I used silicone pans, because I have a permanent grudge against springform pans; and the one jell-o mold that came out of the bowl intact had a textured surface, so it wasn’t crystal clear. At this time, I am accepting zero advice about how to get better results next time, as there will be no next time. The kids had fun, I ate some cheesecake, and that’s what we were going for. Ta dah!
I think Wednesday was also when I decluttered and reorganized the kitchen. Maybe? The days are running together. Someone definitely cleaned my kitchen, and I remember being mad, so it was probably me. Spring cleaning hit hard this year, you guys. And I found the bag of powdered milk that I bought when I first realized that this corona thing wasn’t going to just blow over. I guess I’ll hold onto that.
For the bibimbap, I made a big pot of rice, and cooked up some sliced-up pork and onions in a gochujang sauce
and I set out raw spinach, crunchy noodles, chopped scallions, and miscellaneous sauces and sesame seeds and whatnot. Everyone took what they wanted, and then lined up for their fried egg on top.
Gosh, I love this meal. I like to fry my egg until it’s crisp on the bottom, then flip it over just for a second, then flip it back and slide it on top of the spinach, so it wilts the greens a little. Then some hot sauce.
You got the cold crunchy carrots and noodles with the egg yolk running into it, you got the meat sauce slowly sinking into the rice. Great meal. I’ve tried many different sauces, but I think I’ll stay with the gochujang one from now on.
THURSDAY Quicken quesadillas and chips with pico de gallo
These were, of course, chicken quesadillas, not quicken. I may still have a migraine, and also part of my tooth fell off again. Nevertheless, Thursday was yet another big cleaning project: The Dining Room Heap. It was an ugly afternoon, but I only discovered one backpack full of rotten fruit in the process. And now no one has to crab-walk to get to the dining room table. Such luxury!
And boy, dinner tastes good after you’ve been working hard.
Clara roasted up the chicken and Lena made the pico de gallo
and I shredded the cheese and finally succeeded in coaxing Corrie out of a 48-hour snit by shouting, “HAVE SOME CHEESE, RAT!” and throwing cheese at her.
FRIDAY Fish tacos
Today I open up the bag of avocados and see how I did. I am inordinately proud of my skill at choosing avocados for their ripeness stage. I also have some pineapples and mangoes I’ve been avoiding all week.
Okay, that’s it! I gained forty-three pounds this week, how about you?
Very simple meatballs with a vaguely Korean flavor. These are mild enough that kids will eat them happily, but if you want to kick up the Korean taste, you can serve them with dipping sauces and pickled vegetables. Serve with rice.
Servings30large meatballs
Ingredients
2.5lbsground beef
1sleeveRitz crackers, crushed finely
1/3cupsoy sauce
1/2 headgarlic, minced
1bunchscallions, chopped (save out a bit for a garnish)
1 tspkosher salt
1Tbspground white pepper
For dipping sauce:
mirin or rice vinegar
soy sauce
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 425.
Mix together the meat and all the meatball ingredients with your hands until they are well combined. Form large balls and lay them on a baking pan with a rim.
Bake for about 15 minutes.
Serve over rice with dipping sauce and a sprinkle of scallions.
quick-pickled carrots and/or cucumbers for banh mi, bibimbap, ramen, tacos, etc.
An easy way to add tons of bright flavor and crunch to a meal. We pickle carrots and cucumbers most often, but you can also use radishes, red onions, daikon, or any firm vegetable.
Ingredients
6-7mediumcarrots, peeled
1lb mini cucumbers (or 1 lg cucumber)
For the brine (make double if pickling both carrots and cukes)
1cupwater
1/2cuprice vinegar (other vinegars will also work; you'll just get a slightly different flavor)
1/2cupsugar
1Tbspkosher salt
Instructions
Mix brine ingredients together until salt and sugar are dissolved.
Slice or julienne the vegetables. The thinner they are, the more flavor they pick up, but the more quickly they will go soft, so decide how soon you are going to eat them and cut accordingly!
Add them to the brine so they are submerged.
Cover and let sit for a few hours or overnight or longer. Refrigerate if you're going to leave them overnight or longer.
When I was in ninth grade, a teacher assigned the class to interview someone older than us about their childhood, and write up the results. Being shy and lazy, I decided to interview my father, because I knew where to find him (upstairs).
I remember showing up with the absolute minimal effort: a scrap of paper and a pen, and no preparation whatsoever. He was very annoyed when I asked him to just sorta talk about his life, and he sent me off to do more preparation. Equally annoyed, I slunk off to write up a proper list of questions.
As so often happens with good assignments, I started off just trying to fulfill my minimum obligation, but discovered in the process that there was a lot I actually was curious about. I knew what his favorite holiday treats were, but what did he eat on normal days? What games did he play with his friends after school? Who were his friends, and why? Was there anyone he was scared of? What did his parents expect from him? Did he get along with them? Did that change?
I ended up with a decent article, and I’m fairly sure my father enjoyed the evening. We didn’t get along well at the time, so that’s a stand-out memory in itself: Him relaxing and telling stories, and me listening attentively.
As I listened, I slowly realized something that hadn’t hit home to my self-centered teenage self: This is a real person, not just a rule-maker and the bringer of unfair consequences. This is someone who had a favorite candy and a favorite tree and a favorite uncle as a little boy, someone who got in trouble with his teachers and his parents. This is someone who once wasn’t in charge of anyone.
