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Hunter Grace, ten months old
About two years ago, when we were in the middle of a camping trip at Malibu beach, Hunter Grace, then ten months old, decided that she would no longer eat anything that anyone else fed to her. Pasta and other baby finger foods aren’t exactly camping fare so I hadn’t brought anything like that with us. We ended up paying six bucks for a box of mac & cheese at the camp store and Hunter has happily fed herself ever since then.
Until now.
It probably has something to with Magnus eating solid food, but Hunter almost always reaches a point in every meal where she will not eat anything else unless I feed her, or allow her to eat from one of brother’s baby spoons. So more often than not, I find myself sitting between the two of them at meal times, feeding bites of food to first one, then the other. Magnus doesn’t care as long as everything arrives in a timely manner and Hunter thinks this is great fun.
Me? I think it’s time Michael and I started eating dinner after the kids go to bed.
Pound cake. So named because the original recipe called for a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour.
I don’t even like cake, pound or otherwise. But I made it because Martha Stewart told me to in this month’s issue of her magazine.
It turned out all right, but would have probably been better with some sort of fruit topping.
Who has time to make fruit topping?
We live on the east side of town, a good six miles from the shopping center of Redlands. Just recently, it occurred to me that I should try shopping in the other direction, since the less chic town of Yucaipa is just two miles east of us. I suppose I hadn’t thought of it because Yucaipa is obscured by the Crafton Hills behind us, or, maybe I’m just not very smart.
Anyway. There is a new grocery store in Yucaipa called Fresh & Easy and let me tell you, it’s perfect. It has all the organic and specialty items of a Trader Joe’s at comparable prices but, you don’t have to go to a different store to get brand name items like Coffee-mate. And it’s cheap. Chicken legs and thighs, ninety-eight cents a pound. Unheard of. Organic bagged salad mix for a dollar? Woo woo!
Another advantage Fresh & Easy has over Trader Joe’s: you check and bag your own groceries. I know, I know, a company that does not add many jobs to the community is not necessarily a good thing, but I never escape Trader Joe’s without being annoyed at the checkers who are more concerned with bantering with each other than paying attention to what they’re doing with my groceries. Who wants to listen to snippets of inane workplace drama while watching the idiot behind the counter put your eggs in the same bag as your canned goods?
I hate grocery shopping, and the sooner I can be done with the task the happier I am… and if I can sip (good!) free coffee while I shop without being forced to be polite to people I’d really like to kick in the face… even better!
Michael and I have decided that we need to get out more. Alone. We’ve only been out alone together some six times since Hunter was born, and only a half of those have actually been at night. So last night, our niece Breanna came over and watched the children while we went out to dinner.
We started the evening at Mu (mumartini.com), a Thai fusion place here in town. Mu was formerly the Rama Garden, the best Thai restaurant in town and the place where Michael and I met. Anyway. The food was amazing. Spring rolls to start and Tom Ka Kai. I had the Grilled Lamb Chop with Red Curry and Michael had the Seafood Pasta.
The woman who owns Mu has always been famous for amazing service. Drinks are never empty, the spice tray is always on the table, and the food is delicious. But last night that was not the case. We waited quite a while to order a second round of drinks and when we did order another round, somehow our server thought we didn’t, and we waited for drinks that were never going to arrive. It was very disappointing, and, instead of spending the leisurely evening we had planned at the restaurant, we pretty much felt like we needed to leave.
We haven’t been out at night in town for so long, we didn’t really know where to go to just have a quiet drink, other than the place we just left. We called Jen Fieldhouse for help and she suggested a new wine bar called Time in a Bottle (timeinabottlewine.com). We sat in comfy leather chairs and drank a half-bottle of Italian sparkling wine, a Bellenda Prosecco Brut, (tasty, dry, and a little fruitier than our favorite Veuve Clicquot…) and split a slice of tiramisu.
All in all, a nice, but rather expensive evening. But I didn’t even mention the best part… Mormon missionaries out on the street talking to the Saturday night drinking crowd. I wonder if they were giving people rides home later…
Sure it’s a little cheesy, but, the box of wine has its advantages. Primary among which is the fact that once opened, the wine inside remains drinkable for four weeks. This is important because our days of killing a bottle of wine on a week night are far, far behind us, and yet, a glass of wine with dinner is almost always nice.
I found this little box at Target and even though it’s a Cab-Shiraz mix (and I didn’t buy such a thing on purpose) it is completely drinkable. And well, we console ourselves with the knowledge that the box of wine is much more accepted in places like Europe and Australia.
My husband is dieting.
Yesterday I ate an entire package of cookies.
As Mark would say, “That is all.”
According to Williams-Sonoma, Sicilian Pesto is different from traditional pesto, or Genoese pesto, because it “contains tomatoes and usually omits cheese… Also, almonds replace the pine nuts used in the Genoese version, giving the Sicilian sauce a distinct southern Italian character that reflects an Arabic influence.”
The first time I had ever eaten pesto, of any sort, was actually in Sicily in 1998. It was on a buffet that the Sicilian Hotel Aloha on the Catania side of the island had grudgingly prepared for us. (The Italians do not believe in buffets, and, they were almost as horrified to prepare one for us as our coaches were when they discovered the Hotel’s intent to serve us a two-hour meal. The Italians don’t eat scrambled eggs for breakfast, either.) The pesto was a mass of finely chopped herbs sitting at the bottom of a silver gravy boat filled with green-tinted golden olive oil.
I pointed to it, and the waiter who spoke no English stirred the sauce with a large ladle until the herbs were diffused throughout the oil and he spooned some over a serving of perfectly cooked Gemelli pasta. I was smitten.
I could go on because everything about that first trip to Italy was wonderful; except for the volleyball.
Anyway, I was looking for something to go with the Wild Japanese Sea Scallops I was planning to cook that evening, and since the Italians rarely pair cheese with seafood in their pasta, I had an idea. Luckily, I am also faced with a profusion of homegrown tomatoes, basil, and parsley (ingredients all for Sicilian Pesto). Dinner was served.
So we had Bucatini with Sicilian Pesto (recipe courtesy of Williams-Sonoma), and grilled scallops seasoned with cumin and garlic for dinner last night.
It gives me great satisfaction to eat things that were literally grown in my backyard. The eggplant should be ready soon…
Sure it looks good in Trader Joe’s. Ninety-nine cents for a one pound bag of penne is a good deal, right?
Not when it cooks up gummy and thick and still is not done. Luckily I had every intention of covering the pasta with cheese and a crispy prosciutto topping. I never would have served it with a lighter sauce.
I suppose it’s true, you get what you pay for.
Some of the vegetables that I planted in April are beginning to come in, specifically, the squash and zucchini. On Saturday night, our friend Shannon Johnson joined us for a dinner of goat cheese-stuffed hamburgers and grilled vegetables from the garden seasoned with olive oil, sea salt, pepper and fresh thyme (also from the garden).
The vegetables were so good, as home-grown vegetables usually are, that I didn’t want the left-overs to go to waste. So last night I took the left-over grilled vegetables from our bar-b-que and re-purposed them into an amazing (if I do say so myself…) grilled vegetable and goat cheese pizza on a whole-wheat crust. I served it with a grilled butter-flied leg of lamb that came pre-seasoned from Trader Joe’s (also quite good…).
I normally enjoy all manner of food, but the Sea Monkey has shown a preference for bread, plain pasta, and no meat whatsoever. Oddly enough, he seems to like goat cheese, and lamb for that matter. The Baby Hunter wouldn’t touch the lamb, but, she did eat nine fish sticks…
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