2009 November

Decidedly Low Brow and OK With That

November 30, 2009 By 8 Comments

I finally saw the movie Twilight. I didn’t read the book because I watched my brother as he plodded through Eclipse, the third book in the series even though he didn’t want to because he felt like he couldn’t stop and the zombie like way he’d moan, “must…finish….book…” freaked me out. I suspect that he’d actually been BITTEN and therefore seduced in some sadistic and mystical way because why the hell otherwise would one willingly plow through a 22,000 page book that he hated from page 3? Right? With me? Damn vampires.

It’s called tan in a can…look into it.

The movie was two things. One: overacted, dramatic, obvious, predictable teen dreck. Two: Totally awesome and fantabulous in every way, I almost watched it twice back to back, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it for two days.

What? I’m an enigma.

It’s very difficult for me to write any kind of serious criticism of the movie because ultimately it all ends up with “And Edward is hot and I’d let him bite me any time.” For instance, though the movie obviously abridged the original text, I don’t think the “missing pieces” were that critical because ultimately, all I cared about was watching Edward because Edward is hot and I’d let him bite me any time. Or, the lighting and setting selections were generally useful in establishing mood and tension, but at times they felt too studied and predictable but really, it didn’t matter because the only thing I cared about seeing on screen is Edward because Edward is hot and I’d let him bite me any time. I can’t even go full tilt batsnot crazy about the fact that Stephanie Meyer is fooling approximately NOBODY by claiming that she can still be a good and devout Mormon and write about Vampire Love because it’s about restraint and self-control and true love. More like it’s about what happens when an entire religion and the culture that grows out of that religion suppresses people’s natural instincts and desires so that they finally express their repressed sexuality in a frantic and sometimes even demented manner. It’s still lust if they don’t act on it, Steph. And it’s still lust if blood-sucking, actual physical ingestion of another (hello, still putting part of someone into a part of someone else? Ringing any bells?), is a metaphor for but not exactly the same as doing the humpty dance.

And. Edward is hot and I’d let him bite me any time.

See? Can’t escape it.

I was informed by someone who lives in my house that it was appropriate for me to be loving the movie because Twilight Moms are the newest thing.

Let’s just establish here for the record that I don’t care about the “newest thing” and if THIS is any indication of what these Twilight Moms are all about, then I am not one.

I think that anybody who self-identifies as any kind of specific Mom has issues. Mom is sufficient. In fact, just being Mom is a tremendous amount of work. As in, busier than a one legged man in an ass-kicking contest. If you have to throw in “soccer” or “hockey” or “alcoholic” or “Twilight” before “Mom,” you probably have too much time on your hands and/or no actual concept of what mothering is.

One last thing: Edward is hot and I’d let him bite me any time.

Filed Under: Mama Like, On the Nightstand

Spank You Very Much

November 25, 2009 By 7 Comments

The last two years, I have hosted Thanksgiving at my house. And I loved it. I loved the planning and the cleaning and the decorating and the cooking and the eating and the drinking and the company and the feeling of This is Nice and I Did It.

This year, we’re going elsewhere for Thanksgiving dinner. I keep waiting to feel a little pang or twinge that tells me I wish I were in hostess mode this time around. Thus far, I remain pang-free and twingeless.

I’ve had a student teacher for the last three months. Accepting the role of “cooperating teacher” is risky business. It can mean a ton of work and tricky negotiation of constructive criticism and supportive guidance especially for someone who has difficulty self-editing like a certain someone whose name rhymes with smell fed toastess. I did this once before and holy jeeby creezy it was a nightmare. It’s a little hard to be enthusiastic about a future English teacher who ends sentences with “at” so frequently that your lower level ninth grade students begin to correct her.

This time, however, St. John Baptiste de la Salle or some other pagan god more likely because, hey, it’s me involved here smiled upon me and send me WonderGirl. Best. New. Teacher. Ever. And today is her last day. Which means that I now have to do my actual job for the first time in months. Yikes. My poor students are entirely shellshocked that they have to put up with me for the rest of the year. I think I’m in denial, because here I sit writing out recipes for pumpkin pie and creamed onions and I was just handed a knee-high stack of essays to mark up.

It’s easy to identify what I’m grateful for this year. Her. WonderGirl. Except for the fact that she was so damn good that she’s raised the bar for me and I’m going to have to bust a move or six to live up to the standard that she’s set for these kids.

Not hosting Thanksgiving is feeling like my last hurrah of sloth. I haven’t had to do much teaching work, WonderGirl needed minimal guidance and really the only taxing part of working with her was coming up with original superlatives to describe her and to use in feedback. I’m not even baking the usual 8 pies that I bake and bring when we’re going out for Thanksgiving.

I am, however, making the side dish that my grandmother used to make when my mother was growing up. How do you say you’re not going to crank out some creamed onions for your mother who is practically raising your kids when she’s not going to Costco to shop for you or sending her cleaning people to your house to freaking SWEEP something for the love of god? You don’t. You just make the creamed onions.

Here’s how:

And yeah, I know. Creamed Onions. Sounds gross. But let me point out that the primary ingredients are butter and cream. Enough said.

Blanch and peel 2 lbs pearl onions, if you are foolhardy enough to have bought fresh pearl onions when you can just as easily buy them frozen and already peeled. Seriously. You’ll lose your everloving mind trying to peel these little suckers. Buy the frozen. Skip the blanching.

Put onions and 1 tsp salt in a pot and cover with 1 inch of water. Bring to a boil, then simmer, covered about 20 minutes (less if they are frozen. Like, WAY less) until they are tender. Drain and transfer to a BUTTERED (did I lie??) baking dish.

Put oven rack in the middle, whatever- does anyone pay attention to recipe instructions like that? Preheat oven to 350.

Melt one TB BUTTER in a saucepan and add 1 TB flour, stir for about a minute. Whisk in 1 cup HEAVY CREAM (or half and half, but let’s be real, if you’re going to use half and half, you might as well use heavy cream. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for a few minutes.

Stir in 1/4 tsp salt (why bother), 1/4 tsp black pepper (I’d use more), and 1/4 tsp. nutmeg. The recipe from Gourmet from which I’m ~~stealing~~ borrowing says “freshly grated nutmeg,” but life is far too short to grate your own nutmeg, freshly or otherwise.

Pour the sauce over the onions.

Melt 2 TB BUTTER in a nonstick skillet and add 1 1/2 coarse white bread crumbs, and cook, stirring until golden – this should only take a few minutes.

Sprinkle the crumbs over onions and bake until the sauce is bubbly, probably 30 minutes or so.

In honor of WonderGirl, I also give you the best chicken pot pie recipe in the world, despite the fact that it comes from Martha Stewart and contains instructions like “grow an organic garden full of fresh herbs, perform a Wiccan fertility festival in honor of the herbs, and then harvest them during the full moon whilst wearing a caftan and a hat made from the feathers of one of your prized Madagascar Chickens.” I edited it so you could spare yourself the absurd detail. WonderGirl loves her some chicken pot pie, and if you have turkey leftovers, there is no reason under the sun, unless Martha hears about it in which case RUN and HIDE, it couldn’t be turkey pot pie.

Chicken Pot Pie

Put a 3 or 4 pound chicken in a pot with 4 cups homemade stock, 1/2 of a large yellow onion, 2 dried bay leaves, 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns, one cut up piece of celery and a few thyme sprigs. Boil it, reduce heat, simmer for an hour.

Next, strain the stock and pick the meat off the chicken and set to the side.

OR – you could buy a package of chicken breasts, shove them in a pot with a can of chicken broth and that other stuff and boil it and simmer it and cut it up when it’s done in about an hour. I will not tell Martha.

While the chicken is cooking, combine 1 cup flour, 1/4 tsp salt and 1 TB thyme leaves . Add 10 tablespoons chilled butter, cut up, and pulse until it’s the texture of coarse meal. Add 1 egg yolk and 3 TB ice water and mix it all up. Ball it up, flatten it a bit, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for an hour.

Melt 5 TB butter in a big sauté pan. Add a bunch of cut up red potatoes (1/2 pieces) and some pearl onions (use some from the bag of frozen ones you bought to make the creamed onions) and stir for 5 minutes until the potatoes start to turn a little golden. Add some 1/4 inch slices of leeks, some 1/4 inch pieces of carrot, some mushrooms if your family will eat them unlike mine who say things like, ‘WHAT ARE THESE SLIMY THINGS??” and I add peas even though Martha makes no mention of peas.

Stir for another five minutes or so, then add 5 TB flour and stir it up. Stir in 2 cups of the chicken stock from before and 1 cup of milk. Simmer, stirring constantly, this isn’t so bad b/c it thickens up really quickly. Add the chicken, some lemon zest if you want, but who really cares, some more thyme leaves, some S and P, and pour it all into a casserole dish.

Roll out the dough until it’s about 1/4 inch thick, cover the casserole dish with it, tucking in the edges. Brush the top with an egg yolk and cream blen
d. Bake for 40 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

Almost as great as WonderGirl herself.

Happy Thanksgiving, and a special little thanks to all the new fun people (her and her) and fun people I already knew (her and her andher and her and her) who went out on Monday night to say “Hey” to DaddyScratches.

Filed Under: Holidays, Home is Where the Mess Is, In the Kitchen, Mama Like

Black Hawk Down

November 24, 2009 By 8 Comments

Today I left work at lunch to go to my daughter’s kindergarten Thanksgiving “Feast.” She was a pilgrim. She wore a big white hat and an apron. She sang a song about turkey. She passed on the pudding and corn muffins but happily ate some popcorn. She spent a lot of time looking for me and her father and smiling at us.

Pretty much the most adorable thing ever.

As we were leaving, she was playing some make-believe game with a classmate that involved lots of arm waving and said goodbye to us in this goofy baby voice that she and her friend were using while they played. Right before I said goodbye, I said, “Try not to use the baby voice.”

WTF???

Do I not carry on enough about what constitutes good parenting to expect at least minimum standards of behavior for myself? “Hi Honey! I’m here for your special school Thanksgiving feast!  Sorry to rain on your parade by criticizing your behavior…in front of EVERYONE YOU KNOW.”

I am lucky in that my daughter was so busily playing whatever game she was playing, sitting there wearing her pilgrim lady white paper hat, that she didn’t notice or, at least, ingest, what I’d said.    I’m also lucky that TWGH either also didn’t notice or just resisted the urge to dope slap me.

This parenting stuff is hard.

Time Magazine this week has a cover story on why we, and by “we” I mean “you” because I mostly have my act together in this regard, should stop overparenting our children. Back off on the micromanaging schedules and teachers and homework and playdates and obsessive compulsive safety monitoring. We all know, on some level, that the way to learn is through mistakes and practice and pushing oneself to the next level of challenge – regardless of the task or topic.

But we forget this when it comes to parenting, don’t we? Partly out of the desire to see our precious babies happy and fulfilled and confident and more perfect than we ever were because we know we weren’t nearly perfect enough and we want more for our precious babies. Right? But partly also, I think, and more insidiously, out of our recognition that society is judging us based on our kids’ performance in a series of non-existent and entirely worthless assessments. Do they look cute and clean every day? Do they make the travel soccer team or Varsity swimming team at age 6? Are they in the “advanced” spelling group in first grade?   Do they play with the right kids at recess? Did they get the “best” teacher?    Our fear of being judged because our kids aren’t adhering to a standard of appearance and performance and behavior set by…I don’t even know whom, I suspect it’s a combination of the Pottery Barn catalog, so-called reporting on how celebrities are raising their kids, and the subliminal hum of purveyors of organic milk and produce…makes us call school principals to complain about unfair quizzes, freak out over the possibility that a peanut might make it into the 10 mile radius in which our children live and play, and force our lovely children to learn French and classical piano in preschool.

WHYY, the local public radio station, has an interview show featuring a woman named Marty Moss-Coane. She’s very good, even though her show has a call-in portion which makes me both extremely anxious and borderline homicidal. Today she interviewed a man who was doing research about the benefits of cognitive therapy on adolescents – particularly aggressive or angry or troubled or violent adolescents. If you give an adolescent an opportunity to think about, talk about, and work to understand his/her cognitive processes, that adolescent will become happier and more functional.

If we intervene on our younger children’s behalf at every bump in the road and don’t ever give them the chance to experience challenge or even failure, how will they ever learn how to think about, talk about, and work to understand his/her cognitive processes? How will that child ever LEARN?

So, little girl. You did great today at your kindergarten Thanksgiving feast. And I love you just the way you are. Most especially when you are unselfconsciously playing some game with your cute little friend that includes lots of arm waving and may or may not involve you using a baby voice. Because, you know, you are MY baby. Always.

Filed Under: Keeping it Real, Parent of the Year, What I Know About Your Teenager That You Don't