One of our kids' favorite books (and one of mine, too) is Yoko by Rosemary Wells. It's about an adorably sweet Japanese cat named Yoko, who goes to school with a bunch of American kids (all other animals) who don't understand why she brings sushi for lunch. The other kids make fun of her, so her teacher decides to have International Food Day, when everyone will bring in food from a foreign country and try everything that everyone else has brought.



The first schoolday lunch described in the story is kind of a regular smorgasbord of American sandwiches — peanut butter and honey, egg salad on pumperknickel — and then there's Yoko on the next page, totally loving her sushi until everyone starts making gross faces and teasing her.



For International Food Day, everyone brings in delicious-sounding things like Nigerian nut soup and potato knishes and mango smoothies. I've always loved this book for the variety of foods described. It's a great book to read with a picky eater to give them a sense of the wider world of food. It's also just a charming story about friendship.

Kent asked me the other day if I could pack him some sushi for lunch sometime. I tried to gather myself up off the floor after being knocked over by the sheer impact of his request, and then I said brightly, "Sure!" This is hilarious to me because when we go out for sushi, he eats edamame, plain shrimp, plain rice, and/or fruit. When he was three, sometimes he ate nothing. If Jack and I even toss around the words "sushi restaurant" close to mealtime, Kent asks plaintively, "Do they have anything *I* like??" He thought he had hit the jackpot when we went to a sushi place last weekend and the kids' menu had a corn dog. The corn dog had also been on his list of foods he wanted to try, so he went for it.

Incidentally, why don't sushi places have a kids' bento box with edamame, fruit, rice, tempura sweet potatoes, shrimp, and other yummy stuff like that? IT WOULD NOT BE THAT HARD, PEOPLE. Parents everywhere would love you.

Anyway, Yoko has intrigued him, and I think he wants the experience nonetheless. I decided it would be silly to pack a bunch of sushi in his lunchbox that I knew he wouldn't eat, leaving him hungry for the rest of the day, but if he was home, like for the summer, and he, Dean and I could all try it together... then maybe we could try some of the other foods from the book, too... hmmmm. And thus, our plan for the summer. We will eat our way through Yoko.

Care to join us? I made you a handy PDF checklist, just in case. Order the book or get it from the library, print out your checklist, and make a plan with your kiddos, picky or otherwise. We'll probably skip around rather than trying to do it in order, but I think this should fill up our summer fairly easily since we won't want to do a new food every single day. I'm excited about trying some new recipes, and I'll try to remember to post here whenever we make something exotic like Nigerian nut soup or Caribbean coconut crisps. Vegetarians can look for alternatives to the Irish stew, use veggie dogs in the franks and beans, etc.

Personally, I think the main challenge for me is going to be the squeeze cheese on white bread. I might make my own gross face that day. But I also know there will be brownies with green tea ice cream... we might do that one more than once, just to be sure we really did it right.

Labels: Kent, kitchen adventures, SAHM, what to read

• posted by erica 6/07/2012 10:45:00 AM
•  1 comments

I got some great tartlet pans last year for Christmas, and I kept thinking that when spring and summer fruit season rolled around, I'd be all over making fruit tartlets. I finally got around to it this morning, totally on a whim, since I noticed a confluence of fresh strawberries, peaches, and blueberries in my house.

I still remember the first time I saw a fruit tartlet, at a bakery in France. Bright, beautiful sliced fruit, under a shiny orange glaze, tucked into a perfect little circular pastry. I thought it was magical. I've had some that also have a thin layer of vanilla pastry cream under the fruit, and those are amazingly good, but I thought that for my first attempt, I'd try one that had just fruit and glaze.

I found this recipe and quartered it, because I didn't want to have fruit tartlets for the next week, but I noticed that the shells can be frozen, so next time, I may make a whole batch of shells and then freeze most of them. The pastry got just a tad bit overcooked in the 15 minutes it was in the oven, so next time I'll probably check it after about 13. Also, the glaze was very thick. Like, bordering on Jell-O thick. I'll definitely try less cornstarch next time. I thinned it out considerably with some water after it had cooled, but it still went on very gloppily, as you can see in the closeup photo. It tasted wonderful, though. The whole thing was delicious. I made one for Kent with just strawberries, thinking he would prefer that to one with fruits he didn't like, but he still looked at it skeptically and refused to try it, so Jack and I just ate all of them. One for each of us for second breakfast, one for each of us for dessert after dinner. Perfectly delightful.

My mom is in France this week, and I find myself wanting to make all kinds of foods that remind me of France. This was super fun to try, and it'll be even more fun if I can just pull a few shells out of the freezer and make a few of these when the mood strikes and the fruit is in season.

Labels: kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 7/04/2011 08:58:00 PM
•  3 comments

Tonight's dinner was, I think, my favorite kind. It was brought to us largely from our garden. Green beans from the garden. Couscous with zucchini and basil from the garden, plus chick peas and feta. Homemade crusty wheat bread with basil butter (again, basil from the garden). This is how I want to eat all the time. Good protein, clean flavor, herbs, freshness, and stuff I grew or made myself. I'd need about three times the garden space I currently have, or more, if we were going to make a real go of growing most of our own vegetables... and wouldn't it rock to have some blueberry bushes like Jack's parents have, and/or a couple of citrus trees? I'm dying for more space to grow greens, and I want to try winter squash this year after some of the summer stuff is out of the way. Lumber and dirt would cost a lot upfront to make a super-expanded garden, not to mention the carpentry hours to build more raised beds. At least my husband does carpentry for free. Sometimes I feel like I'm always planning the next season. Though I love the sprouts and flowers and vegetables I'm seeing, I'm always itching for the chance to try new things the next time.

Anyway, this is all to say that I really enjoy deliberate growing and cooking when they're this closely tied together. I enjoy growing for its own sake, and cooking for its own sake, but it reaches a wonderful new level when they're intertwined, when I've planted the seeds and nurtured the plants that sprouted the vegetables we're enjoying for dinner. I'd imagine it would feel much the same way to raise a calf, then make butter or cheese from her milk. Don't worry. I'm not looking into livestock just yet. However, I know too many chicken people, and they have definitely tempted me with the promise of quirky pets and fresh eggs. (Z and Lauren, meet Jon and Emily.) I already have names picked out for our someday chickens...

Also, can I just say how amazing it is to watch my children take up this cause of mine? Kent is a wonderful helper, going on green bean treasure hunts with me, and turning on the sprinkler, and getting so excited about the growth of vegetables and herbs even though he cares nothing for eating them. This summer's corn crop will be a little present from me to him, since our carrots fizzled out last year, and corn on the cob and raw carrots are basically the only vegetables he enjoys. I want to reward his hard work and excitement with something he really loves eating. Dean is too young to harvest much, but is an avid leaf grabber, and he eats herbs straight from the garden. He'll just walk around the back yard with a sage leaf in his mouth. He also loves my cooking, at least for now. Today, when I harvested our very first okra pod and then sliced and fried it, he got his first taste of that amazing snacky thing and couldn't get enough. And I noticed that our watermelon plants have three teeny-tiny bumps already, so all of us shall watch those grow with much anticipation of the sticky summer days to come.

Even though Kent doesn't do the eating part of our vegetables, he still loves to help in the kitchen, so today I gave him my old job from when I was a kid: snapping the beans. I showed him how to snap them in half so the two halves are almost the same size, because his first few were about 1/5 and 4/5. He was so darn proud of himself once he got the hang of it. It reminded me so much (and I told him this) of the day not so many years ago when he sat with my grandmother in her living room and watched her snap beans.


This afternoon (don't you love his determined expression?)


Kent and my Granny, September 2008

So I'm calling this whole thing Lifestyle Gardening. Gardening for the kind of life you want to have. Last week, we picked and immediately took some green beans to our very good friends who live about ten minutes away, just because we were thinking of them and wanted to bring them some of our harvest. And I had so many green beans yesterday that I shared some with our neighbor, and she returned with a finished dish about an hour later for me to sample. I barely know her, but my garden brought us together. That's just awesome. Flowers are beautiful, but I feel like I have to concentrate my efforts. I want to grow things that mean something and that nourish my family, and that I can share to nourish other people. So each year, I ask my husband for a new raised bed, and I continue the dreaming that, over time, works its way into magic on my plate.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 5/17/2011 09:56:00 PM
•  5 comments

I've been thinking this week about how my mom and Bill are going to France this summer, and I'm a little jealous but mostly just excited for them. So that means I've also been thinking about French food. A lot. African hot chocolate at Angelina in Paris. Tarte au poisson and Kir Royal at a bistro in Rouen. Crepes from a street vendor in the Jardin des Tuileries. Croque monsieur sandwiches, pretty much anywhere. On this rainy day, in which I was sorely disappointed not to go to the Rex parade in NOLA and desperately needed something to help me embrace the rain, I couldn't get savory crepes out of my head. Crepes made with salt and herbs instead of sugar and vanilla, wrapped around roasted chicken, mushrooms, and potatoes, and topped with just a smidge of gravy. La Madeleine has something like this on their menu, but it's overly salty and has too much gravy, so I decided I could do better myself.

I can roast a pretty great chicken, but this seemed to need the ease of a rotisserie chicken. Rotisserie chickens remind me of France, too; the apartment I stayed in in Nice was right next to an open market, and I walked past the rotisserie chickens every morning on my way to school. Even at 8 a.m., it's a great smell. Plus, there's that lovely scene from Amélie where she's describing everything to a blind man at breakneck pace, including a child who's watching a dog who's watching some chickens spin on a rotisserie.

The chicken already taken care of, I diced some potatoes and onions, quartered some mushrooms, and threw the vegetables into a roasting dish with olive oil, salt and pepper, and herbes de Provence. They did their thing in a 425 degree oven while we watched Jeopardy! (it comes on at 4:30 here, freakishly), and then I made the gravy and crepes. For the crepes, I used Alton Brown's recipe and followed the "savory" guidelines, using fresh parsley from my garden for the herbs. The gravy had to be vegetarian, because Jack was having the same thing I was having, minus the chicken, so I made a roux and then added a cup of vegetable broth, some dried thyme, and some fresh parsley. I simmered it until it was thick, while I was cooking the crepes, then rolled everything together like a big French enchilada and spooned some gravy on top. Et voilà. It was done.

I had meant to steam some broccoli with it (since the green beans at the store looked horrible) but about five minutes before everything else was done, I realized I had forgotten the broccoli. It would have been nice to have a fresh vegetable, but we did just fine. And I realized that even buying a whole chicken, I fed all of us for less than I would've spent on the thing from La Madeleine.

One bite into it, I knew it was better than La Madeleine's, anyway.

Best rainy day meal I've had in quite some time.

Labels: eating out, kitchen adventures, photography, travel

• posted by erica 3/08/2011 07:26:00 PM
•  3 comments

This afternoon, my boys shared a cinnamon roll for the first time. It was pretty healthy, as far as cinnamon rolls go. I made a batch of wheat bread dough, rolled it out, brushed it with melted butter and sprinkled it with cinnamon and brown sugar, then rolled it up. I was making a loaf of cinnamon bread, actually, but when I roll it up, it's always too long for my loaf pan, so I have to trim the ends and bake them up as rolls with a little extra cinnamon sugar on top. Have to.

Labels: Dean, Kent, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 12/14/2010 08:37:00 PM
•  1 comments

I've decided we have to grow pumpkins every year. This is the most exciting plant I've ever seen. The vine is lovely, with all its spirally sprigs popping out everywhere, the broad dark leaves make a neat canopy, and the huge flowers are such a brilliant orange color. For a while, all of the flowers were male flowers, so they just fell off and no pumpkins grew underneath, but I loved the vine even then. And now that it has a few female flowers, one of which is already making a sizable pumpkin... well, it's basically the coolest plant ever. Also, it has long since spilled over the side of our raised bed and is slowly taking over that quadrant of the back yard. Kent is pretty thrilled. He wants to check on it every day, and the pumpkins do not disappoint; they get visibly larger overnight, so there's always progress. When the kids are a little bigger, it would be really fun to measure and weigh the pumpkins each day and chart their progress.


See these amazing blooms? Our bees have never been happier.


This is the first pumpkin as of about a week ago.


Here's the same pumpkin as of this morning. It's bigger than my hand, and the outside is kind of furry. I have no idea how big it'll get before it turns orange, but I'll try to post a pumpkin update.

When I made pumpkin ravioli a few months ago, I made up a little song to get Kent interested in trying it. As with most new foods, though, he is more excited about the idea of it than the actual eating of it. Still, he talks about making his pumpkins into pumpkin ravioli. And to make his parents melt, when he sings the song, he says, "rabioyi." Oh, how I adore three-year-old speech. Considering the fact that we have pumpkin in the freezer from last year, and we got two pumpkins from the pumpkin patch this weekend, I see many pumpkin delicacies in our future. Perhaps there will be pumpkin gifts for family at Thanksgiving, if they're ready by then.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures

• posted by erica 10/15/2010 10:12:00 AM
•  3 comments

Tonight was the second time I tried to make something I saw on Iron Chef America. It's a bit of a challenge, since they don't publish the recipes the chefs make, and I just have to go off sight, Alton Brown's delightful commentary, and my own culinary knowledge. In Battle Butter, Iron Chef Cat Cora made a butternut squash tarte tatin, a little pastry thing that looked so delicious and easy I had to try it. Keep in mind as you read that this was Battle Butter. Butternut squash, puff pastry (which is full of butter), melted butter, and five spice... that's it. Yum. Kent even ate it. I told him it was a butternut squash pie with cinnamon, enticing him with the two key words "pie" and "cinnamon". He believed me. Add a bit of molasses or brown sugar, and it would taste like an actual pie, but Jack and I thought the flavor was incredible exactly as is. It made a wonderful Friday supper with pork tenderloin, crock pot mac and cheese, and steamed broccoli. I realized after dinner that I should have put five spice on the pork, too, but it was just dandy brined in OJ, apple cider vinegar, and brown sugar, then pan-seared and baked in the oven.


First, I peeled the squash, cut it into slices about 1/2-inch thick, then cut the slices into smaller pieces that would fit in my crocks. Cat Cora had these cute little cast-iron ramekins that held a round slice perfectly, but in the absence of that, I just cut them into semi-circles and a few smaller pieces for the edges. I was going for an even layer of squash on the bottom of each crock. Then I melted some butter (about 4 Tbsp in all for the whole recipe) and added a bit of it to the squash and tossed in some Chinese five spice. Cat Cora used brown butter to toss with the squash and five spice, but I didn't have that kind of time.


I put a little melted butter in the bottom of each crock, then added a layer of squash. My crocks are oval-shaped, so this is what I ended up with.


Next, I cut some puff pastry in the shape of my baking dishes. I used the bottom of the dish for a guide, but since the pastry draws up a little when it bakes, I could have used the top, too. Either way would seem to work.


I topped each layer of squash with a piece of puff pastry, then brushed a tad more melted butter on top. Blame Cat Cora. Then I put my scraps in a baggie back in the freezer. I'm not sure what I'll do with the scraps, but I hate to waste puff pastry, ever.


I baked them at 425 for some length of time. I had this great plan to time it and see how long it took to bake, but I have two small children. Thus, I know that I put them in the oven at 5:40 p.m., but I have no idea what time I took them out. It was maybe 15 minutes later, but I just kept an eye on them until they were puffed and golden brown.


Just to be funny, I made a short movie of these things sizzling when they came out of the oven. Butter. Can you hear it?


The final step is inverting them onto a plate after they've had a few minutes to cool. Well, okay, the FINAL step is eating them slowly enough that you don't burn yourself, but it's hard. They're that good.

Labels: kitchen adventures, photography, video, what to watch

• posted by erica 10/08/2010 07:58:00 PM
•  1 comments

Today, Kent and I cooked a piece of pork and made some fruity couscous with stuff in it I thought he'd like. I'm a huge fan of brining, so I marinated this pork for a couple of hours in orange juice, rice vinegar (we were running low on apple cider vinegar, which is what I normally use), brown sugar, and salt and pepper. I seared it on all sides, then put it in a baking dish, slathered the top with dijon mustard, then had Kent help me put some strips of bacon on top. I know, I know. Bacon on pork. But I can't argue with the results. I baked it until the bacon was done and the pork was cooked through, and it was moist and salty and oh-so-good.

For the couscous, I boiled just under a cup of water, then added 1/2 cup of couscous, a small peeled, diced apple, and a handful of raisins, and I took it off the heat and put a lid on to let it steam. I usually cook couscous for about five minutes, but this particular batch cooked for as long as it took me to get Dean down for a nap... how's that for a helpful gauge? When I came back into the kitchen, I added a handful of cashews, then tossed it with an orange-honey vinaigrette (hoping again to appeal to Kent).

He ate a lot of pork and bacon, and a few pieces of apple, raisins, and nuts, though he was very concerned any time couscous got on something he wanted to put in his mouth. Never the foods shall touch: this is his motto for now. But I did convince him to take a bite with couscous AND raisins together, and he didn't complain. It seemed like he wasn't really into the texture — he never has been any other time we've had couscous — but I keep thinking that if I introduce unfamiliar ingredients along with familiar tastes, he'll get on board at some point. I'm marking today as a success. Plus, I actually liked all of the stuff I cooked, and I thought the sweetness of the couscous was the perfect counterpoint to the saltiness of the pork. I usually say that I like raisins, but I don't like raisins in other stuff, though I discovered today that I really like raisins in couscous. See... moms can try new things, too.

Labels: Kent, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 8/04/2010 02:45:00 PM
•  0 comments

Kent and I had a date this afternoon to see Toy Story 3 (sob, cheer, smile) and followed it up with a cupcake at Barnes & Noble. Jack met us at the bookstore with Dean, who was very happy to see me and catch up on some eating. Apparently he took about an ounce and a half of pumped milk from a bottle, which I wasn't sure he'd do, but Jack said he was pretty desperate. I'm glad I don't have to be away from him very often, and it was nice to know that he would, in fact, drink from a bottle if he really needed to.

We came home and I started cooking a date supper, something I'd been excited about all weekend. Of course, we were all eating dinner together, but having a fancy dinner makes me feel like Jack and I are having a date, even if we're separated by our curiously chatty three-year-old and shouty baby.

This week's meal planning is brought to us by my folder of saved recipes on FoodNetwork.com, in most cases dishes that I've seen on TV but haven't gotten a chance to make yet. The star of tonight's dinner was chicken scallopine in a saffron cream sauce, except that when I saw Giada make it, I instantly pictured it made with tofu instead. (Amateur chefs who are married to vegetarians have to do things like that.)

Incidentally, are you getting tired of seeing all my cooking photos on that same plate? I'm not. But I eat off it almost every night, because my little boy made it for me.

The hardest part of this recipe was convincing myself to spend $8 on .007 ounces of saffron, which is just about the 1/4 tsp called for in this recipe. Now that I've made it, I appreciate the warm flavor of the saffron and that gorgeous yellow color, but I can't say for certain that the saffron totally makes the dish. I might even try it without the saffron sometime; even though I'm sure real chefs would argue that I'm an idiot, I don't think I'd miss it too much. Maybe saffron can be found cheaper on the internet. It's certainly true for vanilla beans. For the record, the tofu held up its end of the bargain, though I'll admit that while I was eating, I was kind of excited about making it again with chicken someday. I think it would be awesome.

I roasted diced red potatoes with a little olive oil, salt, and herbes de Provence, and sautéed green beans with some garlic thrown in at the end. I've decided the potatoes are an essential accompaniment to the tofu scallopine. They soak up the extra sauce perfectly. And Jack and I really needed something to soak up that sauce, because we couldn't stop eating it. We also had a couple of those little loaves of dark wheat or pumperknickel or whatever it is, the little loaves that they have at steakhouses with a big steak knife sticking out of them — do you know the ones I'm talking about? They have to have honey butter on them. So I made some honey butter, too. All in all, this was a really perfect dinner.

I wished that Kent liked more of it, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards right now. Perhaps Dean will like my cooking more than his brother does. We'll find out soon; that little babe is almost 6 months old now, and ready to start on his sweet potatoes.

Labels: kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 8/01/2010 08:37:00 PM
•  7 comments

Our weekly lunch club has temporarily been moved to Tuesdays, due to the free carousel rides on Mondays at lunchtime this summer. Today's menu included honey chicken, adapted from Annabel Karmel's First Meals cookbook, and fiori pasta with carrots, peas, and cheese sauce.

Kent picked out a shape of pasta at the store last week, and we talked during our shopping trip about what he might like to put in the pasta. He settled on carrots and peas, and I decided to make a mild mozzarella sauce to go with it (flour, butter, milk, and fresh mozzarella).

We were looking through First Meals this morning to get some inspiration, and the recipe for honey chicken caught my eye. I wish there were more pictures in this cookbook, because I think Kent could get more excited about something if he saw what the end result would be, but I know they can make a cookbook for much cheaper if it doesn't have photographs of everything. So I tell him about the recipes, highlighting the ingredients I know he'll like, like honey. I changed her marinade based on what I had, mixing together about a tablespoon each of honey, soy sauce, olive oil, and orange juice. I cut a chicken breast into strips and marinated them for about an hour. Then I put them into a skillet with a bit of oil, cooked them on one side, flipped them over, and had Kent add red pepper strips to the pan. I reserved the marinade and brought it to a boil in another pot (very important, to cook out the raw chicken nastiness), then topped the cooked chicken and peppers with the reduced sauce.

The chicken was amazing. I loved the sweet and sour sauce, and the red peppers were perfect with it. For me, anyway. Kent liked the chicken and sauce, but not the peppers. I wasn't surprised, since he's rejected them in the past, but I consider it a major victory when he even tries something like red peppers. He tried to tell me he was all done after two bites of chicken, but I reminded him of the rule that he needs to try everything, so he reluctantly took a bite of pasta. Seriously, what is up with this pickiness? It's flower pasta. A shape he picked out. He fights so hard about trying anything that isn't completely familiar to him. It drives me crazy sometimes, and it's like a huge mental exercise for me to figure out how to get him to try something without giving him food ultimatums, which I hate (i.e., "if you eat x, you can have y"). I thought a cool shape of pasta, with familiar veggies he likes, would be an easy hit, but it was a tough sell. Anyway, once he tried it, he declared, "I LOVE these flowers!" and he was okay with the carrots and peas, though I could tell he wasn't too excited.

So he ate chicken and pasta, not big news since those are two of the only things he eats regularly, but they had new sauces and vegetables with them, and some of that stuff got in his mouth, too. Baby steps, baby steps.

Labels: Kent, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 7/27/2010 01:33:00 PM
•  2 comments

I'm pulling a pan of my grandmother's rolls out of the oven. They're delicious. This is the fifth or sixth time I've made them, but the first time when they've actually tasted right. When they taste right, I want to eat about five of them in one sitting.

That is all.

Labels: family, kitchen adventures

• posted by erica 7/26/2010 06:28:00 PM
•  0 comments

"A party isn't a party unless you pick up small food with toothpicks."
—The Man With the Yellow Hat, Curious George television series

We had our friends Jennifer and Brett over for dinner last night. Kent always has a terrific time with them, and we've recently discovered that it's much easier when we go to each other's homes instead of meeting at a restaurant. The food is better, too. We went over to their apartment for swimming and pizza a few weeks ago, so we had them over for lasagna and various related food objects last night. I cooked a lot of stuff and was in danger of going overboard, but it was well worth it to make our friends feel special and have a lot of delicious things we all enjoyed.

We started off with some toothpicky antipasto, salami wrapped around fresh mozzarella, and mini caprese salads with tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and cucumbers (which I later drizzled with balsamic vinegar on Brett's request). I also breaded and fried some artichokes, the one and only Sandra Lee recipe I have ever cooked and enjoyed. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I liked something of hers. But I guess in all her blubbering and food gaffs there's bound to be a grain of deliciousness. A stopped clock is right twice a day, after all. (Okay, now I feel really mean.) The recipe for the artichokes is so old that it isn't on the Food Network website, but it basically consists of draining canned artichokes, dipping them in beaten egg, breading them in Italian breadcrumbs, then frying them until they're golden. They're marvelous, crispy little bites of salty flavor.

After the appetizers, we had veggie lasagna packed with roasted eggplant, peppers, zucchini and mushrooms, and made with homemade sauce (thanks, Anne!). Crusty bread, roasted garlic, and a simple green salad rounded out the meal. I dressed the salad with a vinaigrette made with honey, Dijon mustard, salt, olive oil, and my favorite vinaigrette-making ingredient: Trader Joe's orange muscat champagne vinegar. I miss Trader Joe's, but I can get versions of basically everything else they have except for this awesome vinegar, so I always stock up when we drive through Atlanta.

Yes, Atlanta, nearly 9 hours away, has the closest Trader Joe's. Meh.

Jennifer and Brett are newlyweds, and as such have been laden with new cooking equipment, so she was eager to try out some of her new bakeware and a brownie recipe I had given her at Christmas. Brett suggested that she add peanut butter chips instead of chocolate chips. Win. They were too good for description. Chocolate and peanut butter... you get the idea. Milk required.

After dinner, Jennifer and Brett both started cutting up with Kent, flying him around the room and having him jump over their legs and doing all sorts of silly things that he just lapped up. I watched them and thought, "Yes, this is what Kent has been in desperate need of: some time to just have fun!" Consequently, every time I woke up in the night (which is often, because of Dean), I thought about how Jack and I have gotten stuck lately with "parenting" and have forgotten to just have fun with our three-year-old.

Brett is a percussionist, and we watched one of his videos on YouTube while Kent sat in his lap and Brett drummed with him. They had the greatest time. Brett is going to be such a cool dad — they're both going to be great parents — and they're getting a lot of practice with Kent. (Luckily for them, they just get to do the fun part now, and then when it's time to get the boy through the bath and bedtime routine, we take over...)



Good friends are good for so many reasons.

Labels: friends, Kent, kitchen adventures, photography, video

• posted by erica 7/25/2010 07:54:00 PM
•  1 comments

We took a trip to New Jersey a few weeks ago to visit my mom and a bunch of family who were also gathering there. The official reason for the trip was to celebrate my grandfather's 80.5 birthday, since his 80th was in January and we didn't get a chance to celebrate as a family then. His 80.5 was on July 4, which meant we were also gathered for Kent's birthday on July 3, plus the holiday festivities and fireworks.

We got there on a Thursday, settling in and hanging out with my grandparents who also arrived that day. The flight was pretty bumpy on the way down, and Kent ended up being sick right when we landed and he was thrown forward. I cleaned him off and changed his clothes without too much trouble, and Jack and I wondered why in the heck we can't seem to have a trip to visit my mom without Kent throwing up.

On Friday, we borrowed a car and drove down to Philly to visit our friends Lauren and Steve. Lauren (and Jeannette) had told me about a fabulous little play cafe in Chestnut Hill called The Little Treehouse, a sweet super-fun place that's almost just like the kid-friendly coffee shop I've been dreaming about.


I didn't remember to take any pictures of the actual play space, which took up about half the interior, or our amazing wood-fired pizza or coffee drinks... but the place was amazing. Here's just one aspect of the amazingness. Toys on the wall of the bathroom for the kids to play with while Mom goes to the potty. I have a difficult time keeping Kent in the bathroom with me sometimes, since he goes right away and then wants to leave before I'm done. Example: when I took my pregnancy test at Target last year and found out I was pregnant with Dean, Kent busted out of the handicapped stall before I had my pants up. I'll never forget that. So having something to keep him occupied was pretty ingenious.


We spent the rest of the afternoon chilling with Lauren and Steve, who gave Kent a card that we could turn into a cardboard airplane. There was much revelry throwing the airplane around their apartment. We also introduced Kent to a couple of different video games on the Nintendo Wii. He couldn't quite understand that his movements while holding the Wii remote were controlling what happened on the screen, but he thought bowling with 100 pins was pretty spectacular. Several of my friends in town, who have kids just a little older than Kent, have Wiis, and I've thought seriously about getting one sometime soon so that we can play games as a family. Perhaps it's in our future.



We also did a lot of Dean-gazing, because he's fun and very giggly.


We made a stop by the side of the road on the way back to NJ that evening, because Dean needed a break from the carseat. I snapped this picture of our reflection in the car's window.

Saturday was Kent's birthday, with a party and cake planned for the evening. My stepbrother Chris and his wife Cat had arrived from NC, my Aunt Mary and Uncle Jeff and two of their kids, Dave and Dan, had flown in from Colorado, and my stepsister Morgan, her husband Brian, and their baby daughter Blythe drove up from Baltimore on Saturday, so we had a pretty large crew. During the day, Mom and Bill took my little branch of the family to a carnival in town that Bill had some experience with as a Kiwanian. Mom, Kent, and I rode on the ferris wheel, which Kent always loves doing, and then Kent got to ride kiddie rides for the first time. He had a blast. He just kept grinning and smirking and then running around excitedly, telling us which thing he wanted to do next.
 
 
 
 


It was dang hot, so Dean and I bought a bottle of water and chilled in the shade where we could still see Kent.


Here's Kent getting a fun shoulder ride from Bill.


After Kent's nap, the birthday festivities got going, which included swimming, grilling out, and Kent's birthday cake, which I decorated earlier in the day to his specifications. He had told me he wanted a space shuttle on his cake, so I ran with it, and this is what I ended up with:


Several people have been confused by the numbers at the bottom, thinking that perhaps Kent was turning 32, but it says "3 2 1!" for anyone who can't read frosting.

On Sunday, we had a sort of lazy morning at Mom's house, while Mom, Bill, and my grandparents went to church. Ordinarily, we would go with them, but we knew that between Kent being in an unfamiliar church (and consequently not wanting to go to the nursery), and the up-and-down dance we usually do with Dean at our own church, we wouldn't get much out of the service, so we sat it out this time and hoped for a day in the future when it'll be easier to tag along. After church, we all went to a diner for brunch/lunch, and I got a Greek-style chicken wrap with tzatziki sauce, something I'd been craving. It was perfect. I don't quite remember what anyone else ate because I was so happy eating my own food. I think Kent had part of a meatball and some spaghetti, plus the chocolate pudding that came with his meal. It's funny, I read a quote recently about having realistic expectations while on vacation, and the example the author cited was that if your child is a picky eater at home, s/he is going to be a picky eater on vacation. Um, yes.



After the meal, Jack and Brian found themselves swaying side by side with their respective babies, so everyone turned to look and smile, and then Dave and Dan decided they ought to get in on the swaying, so Dan jumped into Dave's arms and gave us all a good laugh.



Back at home, Morgan and I took about 100 pictures of Blythe and Dean together in their Fourth of July outfits. What a couple of cuties. They're a month and a half apart, destined to be great friends as they get older. Dean hadn't quite developed all his sitting up muscles yet, so he kept falling over and we kept propping him back up next to her.


Brian caught a snooze later with Blythe and Mom and Bill's cat, Barnaby.


And my favorite part of Sunday was a little personal tribute to my grandfather: homemade pretzels. He and I made these all the time when I was a kid (though admittedly I didn't drink beer with them back then... I didn't know what I was missing). I have so many memories revolving around those pretzels. There was greasing the pan with Crisco, then having to wash it off my hands while my grandfather turned up the water temperature and I complained repeatedly that it was too hot. There were all the times I tried to make letters for everyone in my family instead of the classic pretzel shape, and my grandfather was a terrific sport and tried to keep Ms, Es, and Js together in the water bath and on the pan so that the letters would stay intact. And there was the time that we couldn't find the recipe (in the days before looking things up on the internet), and we tried to recreate the recipe from memory. I think my grandfather looked at it as a teachable moment, but I was too young to be much help.


Here's Kent munching on his pretzel by the pool. One of my favorite things about having kids is passing on traditions to them that have already brought me so much joy.

Here are some more pool pictures from throughout the weekend:






On Monday, Dave and Dan did a lot of crazy diving where they attempted to dive under each other, do high-fives on the way into the water, etc. I took a lot of pictures and a couple of short movies, and I thought I was going to be calling the collection "How Dave and Dan Ended Up in the Emergency Room." But somehow they managed not to injure each other, except one time that I heard Dave say, "You poked me in the eye!" Those two are hilarious. I wish we all lived closer.


All the diving board action seems to have inspired Kent to finally jump into our arms in the pool, and he dazzled us with his newfound adventurous spirit in the water.


Mom read a lot of books with Kent. I just love watching my mom bond with my kiddo.


At some point in the weekend, Chris and Cat posed for me to take a quick picture in Mom and Bill's kitchen. I was terrible about taking lots of pictures of everyone, so when I realized I didn't have any of them, I had to fix it.


Mom has lived in NJ for (almost?) three years now, and in that short time, I have developed a favorite tradition: walking to the little farm stand on the main road, shopping for produce, and then eating a cider doughnut and petting the goats. Here are Jack and Kent sharing a doughnut in the sun. Not much beats a doughnut enjoyed with the people you love most.

Inevitably, we had to go home. It was one of the few trips I've taken where I really didn't feel ready to leave. However, the temperatures in NJ were topping 100 that Tuesday, and when we got back to New Orleans, it was a pleasant 80 degrees. Talk about a schema breaking.

As we boarded the plane, the very eager flight attendant offered to let Kent go into the cockpit, and the pilots were all over him and had a great time with him while I went to grab the camera.


The pilot insisted on posing Mike the Tiger Kitty as well, and I was cracking up at all of them. I've said many times that I wish I could always fly Southwest because the staff is so great, but Continental gave them a run for their money this time.


And here's our wide-eyed baby enjoying the flight home.

The web of family was tightened a bit over this weekend, strengthening our bond across the vast country where we've been scattered. Thank goodness for the internet, and air travel.

Labels: Dean, family, Freude, holidays, Kent, kitchen adventures, Philly, photography, travel

• posted by erica 7/20/2010 01:29:00 PM
•  1 comments