A Plate of Spaghetti

A few years ago, someone gave me a copy of Marcella Hazan’s classic Italian cookbook. It’s a treasure trove of Italian recipes. I’ve yet to try many of the classics, but the bolognese sauce recipe has been in constant use. Adding the milk to the meat tenderizes it. Adding carrots bumps up the sweetness, and skipping onions helps the tomatoes keep their flavor. If you have time to let it simmer for multiple hours, as the recipe calls for, it caramelizes just enough and has a rich flavor. If you’re like me, though, you’ll cook it for 20-30 minutes and add a little brown sugar instead. The result is a hearty sauce that feels decadent. I’m careful not to mix in too much pasta because the sauce needs to be abundant — the dish is more about the sauce than the spaghetti (or linguine or whatever pasta you decide to use). Crusty bread is nice to have on hand.

Linguine with Bolognese Sauce

Olive oil for the pan
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb ground beef
2-3 peeled, diced carrots
1/2 cup whole milk
1 12oz can of crushed tomatoes
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp basil (if dried — a handful of chopped leaves if fresh)
(optional) tbsp brown sugar
1 lb pasta (or 3/4 lb)
Salt and pepper

Heat garlic in a pan with two or three peeled, diced carrots for a few minutes. Add a pound of ground beef. Cook until no longer raw, but not entirely brown, then add 1/2 cup of whole milk. Stir and continue to cook until milk is absorbed. Add a few pinches salt. Add a container of crushed tomatoes and a tsp. of oregano and chopped or dried basil. Simmer for a good long time. If you don’t have an hour or two on your
hands, cook for 20-30 minutes and then add a tbsp or so of brown sugar to sweeten it up. Add salt and pepper to taste. Toss with linguine or other pasta (just make sure you have more sauce than pasta).

Blueberries!

I know it’s Fall, and no longer blueberry season, but I’ve only just gotten around to downloading summer photos from my phone, so here’s a blueberry post.

The wild blueberry crop upstate was impressive this year, so we made blueberry ice cream two times and it was a hit. Basic idea: cook the blueberries with some sugar, let it cool, and mix it into your basic cream+sugar+vanilla ice cream recipe. Add any other fruit puree you care to make. Delish.

Second, there is a time-honored recipe in our family for blueberries. This one is not to be missed.

- Stir together some dollops of sour cream with some brown sugar
- Add blueberries
- Eat

I’ve been making this since I was a child. I can remember making it with a friend in the Poconos during the summer, and that same friend — now Remi’s godmother — still makes it herself. It’s a summer treat that I have forgotten about for years and then ecstatically rediscovered. Remi was duly initiated into the ritual this summer.

Sort-Of Sushi (for the Kids!)

A few weeks ago, while standing at the bulk bins at the co-op, I spotted sushi rice and decided that its presence there must mean that homemade sushi can’t be that hard. I bought some along with the rice vinegar Google told me was needed and watched a few Youtube videos about making sushi (some after the first attempt, which seems to be my usual cooking approach: make it up, then look up a recipe when it falls all to pieces). Due to recent snacking trends involving seaweed, I had some sushi-appropriate Nori sheets, too (Remi quite likes them).

For the filling, I made some tamago-like egg (again, totally winging it based on a recipe I saw ages ago — egg, soy sauce, sugar cooked in a thin layer, then rolled up) and sliced up some avocado and cucumber.

In my head, I imagined a few weeks of sushi obsession in the household, with Remi and neighbor Bella spending hours of quality time helping me make different kinds of California rolls, perfecting their technique, eating wholesome, bunny-cracker-free meals, etc.

In reality, Remi humored me for about 10 minutes and ate the rice off on one piece of sushi, and Bella — usually a dedicated sous chef — decided she wasn’t interested. She proudly carried the result over to show her mom, but deigned to participate in the construction of the thing.

We don’t have the little bamboo roller thing (I hesitate to introduce more stuff to the house), so I used my fingers. I can’t say the result was fantastic, either — I ate my fair share, as I will do with just about any food set in front of me, but sushi-restaurant fare is definintely superior. Mine was pretty bland and definitely needed some wasabi or wasabi mayo (as one YouTube video recommended). This is one type of food it makes sense to pay a professional to make. (I suppose buying the roller thing would help, too, but I fear it will share the fate of the pasta drying rack, juicer, etc., in the bottom drawer.)

It occurs to me now that my cooking style is anathema to the precise, measured style of Japanese sushi-making, and this is perhaps not the best use of my free-wheeling culinary talents. Still, it’s something to try with preschoolers once, just so you can brag at the playground about the enriching project you did int he morning.

Lazy-Person’s Sushi Recipe:

Sushi rice
Rice vinegar
Nori seaweed sheets
Veggies or tamago for stuffing (avocado, carrot, crab stick, cucumber)
Wasabi mayo or wasabi
Soy sauce for dipping

Fill a small bowl with water. Sprinkle rice vinegar (about a tablespoon for each cup of rice) over the rice and mix gently. Then dip your fingers in water and use them to spread rice over the seaweed, leaving a space at the top for sealing your roll. Add your veggies/filling (and wasabi mayo or other flavoring) in a line about a third of the way up from the top, then use your hands to roll from the top to the bottom. Wet the top edge with water to seal it. Then use a very sharp knife, moistened with water, to cut your roll.

Pork Chops with Mango and Ginger

I’d like to devote most of the posts on this blog to recipes and cooking. I have a feeling that many of them will focus on cooking with or for Remi, but this one is a standard quick meal we all share (although we’ll probably shelve this one for a while in light of recent dental developments!).

Every July and August, we take a few trips upstate to the Adirondacks. We kayak, swim, forage for blueberries and raspberries in the woods, and eat extremely well. Part of the eating-well is thanks to Oscar’s — a meat store in Warrensburg, NY that attracts tourists and locals from miles around. The entrance is marked by a carved wooden pig, and the store carries a wide variety of fresh meat and pork. The beef jerky is wonderful — anything smoked there is wonderful. If you order hamburger, they grind it for you (great for beef tartare, if you’re into that sort of thing). They have fantastic varieties of sausage, horseradish cheese, and smoked bacon (oohh, the bacon). It’s always a struggle for me not to buy out the store.

We came home one year with pork chops — some smoked and some not and all thick and tasty. I was so excited to try different things that I probably cooked every pork chop a slightly different way, which led to strange dinner conversation, since no one could really compare theirs to the rest. The version with the mango topping seemed pretty failsafe (smokey and sweet flavors go well together), so it’s become part of my regular dinner rotation at home.

One ripe mango, diced
orange or apricot juice
1 tbs fresh ginger, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3-4 pork chops
Salt and pepper

Rinse chops and pat dry. Salt and pepper chops. Put ginger and garlic in a bit of olive oil in a pan (a cast iron pan works well for this) for 30 seconds or so. Add the chops and brown them a bit on each side. Add the juice and fruit, and cover. Cook until chops are done and remove chops. Continue to cook fruit and juice until it has reduced a bit, and pour it over the chops. If you have some mint handy, add that to the sauce near the end and as a garnish.

Ah, Karma

Not 12 hours after I posted that first post about attachment parenting, I found three small cavities in Remi’s beautiful little front teeth — the likely result of all that night nursing and co-sleeping I’d been advocating.

I had edited the post at least 20 times because I felt guilty about the high-and-mighty tone and preachiness of it, and I tried to make it sound a little less dogmatic. Still, the universe clearly saw fit to introduce a little punishment for my over-confidence. I’m still firmly in the do-what-feels right parenting camp, but it goes to show that nothing is black-and-white.

Hours of research and a visit to the dentist (an awesome dentist, btw, named Dr. Bienstock) have informed me that night-nursing and a modern western diet don’t really mix. Oh well.

Instead of sending me away from the attachment parenting route, I think I’m about to enter a whole new realm of AP nutrition. I always pooh-poohed the people who were vigilant about removing sugar and white flour from the diet — we limit it and use whole grains and a really varied and good diet, but I took an more flexible approach to food in the interest of letting Remi explore all kinds of food and thereby learn to love it all, like I do — from beets to liver pate to bunny crackers and bagels.  Now we apparently need to focus on shellfish and grass-fed butter to help reverse the decay, and cut back on a variety of things that we like (adios, dried mango). This has forced us to be vigilant about night-weaning completely and brushing, though, which was overdue.

These changes coincided with Remi’s first week sans diapers, so the kid is having a crash course in big-kid activities. He’s taking it in stride, saying repeatedly that “he’s a big boy,” and the unfortunate follow-up, “big kids have gum!” Bella introduced him to the chewing-gum concept — I think he’s getting confused between the tooth gum talk and chewing gum and bubble gum flavored things at the dentist’s office (!)…poor Remi — no chewing gum for him yet. Not after this week!

My Grandmother Anne’s Cinnamon Toast

I grew up in a wonderland of falling-apart architecture from the previous century in New Jersey. My grandmother Anne’s large yellow victorian house was next to ours. Perched on a hill and resembling a prow of a ship, it was surrounded by terraces, a pool, a barn, a giant, bird-infested indoor tennis court, an outdoor tennis court, and a guest house.

The terraces were overgrown and magical — discovering each level (they were separated by hedges) felt like finding a secret garden, a small piece of land preserved from an earlier time. Initials of aunts and uncles or generations before were carved into a tree at the top of the terraces, and the same tree could be climbed for a glimpse of Manhattan.

The pool was large and always cool — certainly from a previous era. Two cobweb-filled, pastel-colored bath houses stood at one end. There were cement birdbaths, old lawn chairs, plenty of leaves in the pool, and honeysuckle wisteria bushes. Nearby, in the woods, one might come across an abandoned sculpture of the virgin Mary (the legacy of my maternal great-grandmother) and imagine that some long-lost treasure had been found.

The house itself was full of secrets and wonder. It was carved up into three separate living quarters so my grandmother could rent loan parts of it to a collection of relatives and friends (she kept the place from falling apart and somehow paid NJ taxes on a shoestring budget). She claimed the house had a secret room, which my mother and I tried desperately to find. I loved the stained glass windows, the toilet seat cover with the newsprint motif, the old books, and the spooky skulls in the attic from Africa safaris.

From time to time, the house would be packed with my grandmother’s raucous brood of seven children and their families. These were the most enchanting times for me, because my aunts and uncles were all gifted at telling stories of their adventures — either at the ranch in Wyoming where they spent summers after Anne’s first divorce, or in Llewellyn Park, where they tried to blow up the swimming pool I just described, or shoot squirrel, or terrorize each other. This was not a family with money, but one that had the luxury of growing up with the spoils of a few previous wealthy generations. The outsized personalities remained, though the funds did not.

When the house wasn’t full, we would fall out of the habit of walking through the rhododendrons to visit Anne (always known as “Anne” to grandkids, cosmopolitan family that we were). Occasionally, Anne would try to bridge the gap. In her eighties, for instance, she taught me to ski (“just go!”). More often, she invited me and my brother over for cinnamon toast. I remember it vividly. Her kitchen was tiny because the original gigantic kitchen had been converted to a living room for the renters. She would mix together a few things in a pan, then spread it over Arnold white bread (not the baguette shown below) and put it in the oven until the crusts curled slightly.

We’d sit a tiny table with stools and eat and talk. About what, I have no idea, but I know her painted wooden pocketbook was sitting by the door, and there was milk from possibly the last working milkman in New Jersey in the fridge. Like the house, and like Anne herself, her cinnamon toast was utterly unique — a far cry from the hastily-assembled bread, butter, and cinnamon sugar most of us know.

Here’s a recipe — probably not exactly what she did, but then again she probably never made it the same way twice anyway.

1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
Toasted bread (I used leftover french bread, but this works fine on sandwich bread)

Melt the butter on medium heat and add the sugar, syrup, and cinnamon. Cook until bubbling and continue to cook until it has thickened (4 minutes or so). Pour over toasted bread and eat, or, if you’re a purist, pour over bread and toast in the oven for 5-10 minutes at 300 degrees.

Mama Bear Rant: Why Isn’t Attachment Parenting Mainstream?

Earlier this evening, I read a pretty traditional account of American parenting in the first six months of a baby’s life. Now, hours later, I’m unable to sleep and am still feeling unsettled by it.

Let’s say that the parents in question are educated, wonderful people — urban professionals with creative tendencies. They enjoy food, shop at the co-op, live in a small New York apartment, and are pretty similar to us. After the baby was born, though, they went down a more traditional path than we have, and their account of it was full of suffering and misery. Standard practice in this country with newborns involves putting them in a crib in a separate room, putting them to sleep on their backs (which can cause reflux), feeding on a schedule (somewhat less common), and leaving them to cry until they fall asleep, starting at four months (“sleep training”).

I kept wanting to intervene on behalf of the baby to say to the parents, “Hey, trust your instincts! Go to the crying baby, bring him into your room, let him sleep in different positions, and nurse him when he asks for it. Babies and mothers know what to do. Keeping your baby close to you means you don’t need to physically get out of bed to nurse him, so you’ll be less exhausted. Babies aren’t meant to sleep in their own rooms! They’re programmed to want to be with you, and if they are, you can respond to their needs quickly and quietly.

With Remi, we experienced the same awful reflux these parents described, but were able to cure it by putting him on his tummy to sleep — something that was totally accepted 30 years ago, but that isn’t now because of the SIDS risk. We read up on risk factors and felt Remi had good head control before we did it. We also were in the same room with him, so were very aware of how he was sleeping.

The description of letting the baby cry it out to get to sleep over a period of months made me so aggravated I had to stop reading. More crying & fewer feedings = less brain development and growth. I don’t feel it’s fair to any child to deprive them of that essential early development and I assume there are lasting effects. Also, early sleep-training = more parental angst and less trust and fewer feelings of security on the part of the baby. Many books argue that using CIO means a baby can put herself to sleep and stay that way for longer periods. It’s certainly something you can teach your baby to do, but I don’t believe it’s in the baby’s best interest. Longer, deeper sleep without the milk the baby needs to grown during that sleep doesn’t seem healthy. I also think responding to your baby strengthens your bond and results in fewer crying fits and less separation anxiety down the road. Sleep training later, when it feels right to the parent, seems okay. (When exactly it should happen is up for debate — every baby is different. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m no expert because we never did this and I still nurse Remi at night after 2+ years. I started to feel better about some CIO as Remi grew older. I know friends who advocate 7 months. As long as the baby is still nursing in the middle of the night, that seems okay — again, there are a million ways to approach this, but expecting a baby to sleep for 8-10 hours at 4 or 5 months, or letting a baby that age cry for long periods, seems worrisome.)

Why do people persist in these habits? Is it the medical community’s one-size-fits all approach that we revere? Even if we feel that it’s wrong to listen to your crying baby and not pick her up? It does seem typically American to apply so much science to the very ancient process of raising a child.

After consulting Google just now, it seems that we have proven that IQ, behavior, and health are all improved by attachment-parenting practices (some details here). Why aren’t they more promoted, then?

I seem to have a physical reaction to these issues — I feel sick when I hear stories of babies crying for long periods at night without comfort. This didn’t happen before I had Remi, so I suppose hormones are at work. I know I come across as rigid and judgmental, and I know I need to acknowledge that different things work for different babies and their families, but I’m dealing with some deep-seated protect-the-species instinct.

I know some of the things we’ve done — extended cosleeping and elimination communication (going diaper-free sometimes, which my son loved) — will seem wrong to others and may produce the same feelings.  But I’ll stand by the basic rule of staying with your baby in the early months and responding to her needs. I feel like babies should have certain rights — it sucks that they’re whisked away even when they’re born and this cycle of letting the baby cry instead of meeting the baby’s needs begins. Babies are people too! Most non-western cultures use attachment parenting basic for the early months — breastfeeding on demand, cosleeping, baby-wearing. Why can’t we make this more mainstream?

Update: I’m feeling a little sheepish about being so dogmatic here, especially after mom and Amber pointed out a few things… I just regularly struggle with this utter conviction that it’s my way or the highway. I wonder if it’s hard-wired into my brain because, as mom says, having the strong conviction that I’m doing the right thing is what ends up making me a better parent. That would explain the women on the bus/street endlessly, urgently offering advice to all the new parents they see. We just can’t help ourselves.

And another update — some good discussion about tummy-sleeping here.