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We do a lot of “experiments” around here. Mainly we blow the tops off bottles. Sometimes we make rockets; sometimes we use bare cork. The basic ingredients are usually the same – 2 tbs baking soda and 1/4 c to 1/2 c vinegar. I say usually because Will’s been listening to our govt and seems to think that any liquid and any powder will have the same effect. So, I let him experiment with mustard, garlic powder, water, wine, etc.

Anyhow, the pictures above are from last nights experiments. I plan to break out the baking soda and vinegar tomorrow if we make it through our bag of poppers.

Will’s report from Tahoe is that “Grandma said ‘stupid’ and ‘damnit’ when the door slammed on her. She used all the bad words. Those aren’t nice things to say.”

No they aren’t. And we expected so much more from Grandma!

Our nanny’s sister flew in from Nepal to take care of her last week and has convinced her to come back to Nepal to rest. I’m pretty sad about this because it is hard to find people I actually like to take care of my babies. Sylvie is a little bit too young for most schools, tho she started Carlos’ Mi Escuelita today, replacing Will. Unfortunately, Carlos is full for now, and I don’t think we’ll be able to squeeze in other days.

Top it all off with the fact that Sylvie did not take kindly to me dropping her at Carlos’ this morning. She started crying when she saw me put her lunch box up, and then clung to my leg with the famous death grip (where do they learn that?) for an hour. I was seriously rethinking this Carlos twice a week thing, as I’m not sure it is enough time to really bond with her peers and I can’t handle drop offs like this.

We’re spoiled. We can walk less than a mile to a street that spans a 1.5 miles and is lined on both sides with great restaurants the entire stretch. One of those restaurants, Fonda, is a common date night haunt because the service is good, the drinks are interesting and the food is excellent. So good, in fact, that I crave their mushroom quesadillas.

I’m attempting a version tonight with the Mayo Clinic recipe for gorditas and a filling made from wild mushrooms, shallots, epazote and melted monterrey jack. We’ll round this out with Herdes green sauce, black beans and avocados. This is probably not growing food. Or as the conversation goes in our house, “Will this make my arms big?” Frankly, no, but it might work wonders on that stomach!

I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I’ve stumbled across an excellent marinade for light fish or tofu – Soy Sauce and Thai Kitchen Red Curry Paste. (see image below)

Basically, I rub the victim with a light coating of the curry paste – it shouldn’t too dark red as this stuff is spicey – wash my hands really well before touching anything sensitive, and then drown the victim in soy sauce. After at least 30 minutes, grill. YUM!

Last night I had this marinade on a piece of sea bass. Tonight we marinaded some tofu for 2 hours then grilled it.

If you are a fan of red curry, this stuff makes cheater curry fast. I like that we can vary the heat pretty easily.

We saw WALL E, today. Sylvie’s first movie in a theater. She was so excited her eyes were as large as saucers for the 20 minutes she was awake. As this was Will’s 4th movie, he is now a veteran, and approached the event with ennui. WALL E is a modern fairy tale replete with a hefty moral. WALL E, a cockroach and a plant are the last “living” things on Earth after humans covered the planet in garbage, escaping via cruise [space]ship to circle the universe in high tech hover rafts getting fat on junk food while WALL E and his friends clean up. The cruise ship has apparently been sending robot probes back to Earth to search for signs of life which would indicate it is time for the cruise to end and the humans to return to their clean home, but for 700 years, there have been no such signs. But then, WALL E finds a plant and that starts the central plot in motion. The love story is amusing. The environmental doomsday was a little heavy handed, though I might be able to use it to convince Will to be less messy.

All in all, it is a good flick and worth the $45 it costs to visit the theater. Okay, worth the Netflix rental fee.

On an entirely different note, yesterday we went to Doug’s Aunt Ellen’s memorial service at Saint Raphael. She has been ill for a long time, and so hopefully she is much more comfortable where she is, now.

We’ve been so lucky in the handme down department, I’ve always somehow had something nice to dress the kids in when events like this arose. Not the case yesterday. The handme down well has runneth dry. We squeezed Will into a 3t dress shirt my mom bought him, and Sylvie into one of her hundred Christmas dresses (which fit much better now!) It was a tad flustering rushing to find something appropriate. I vowed once I got them dressed to always have one nice outfit on hand. 

Anyway, when we were all dressed and in the car, Will showed me a bag full of pink post its, declaring that “Each adult gets one of these” and then showed me two tiny monkeys, “and these are for each of my cousins” I thought Doug must have given him the post its with the instructions that each adult was supposed to write something nice about Ellen… that is Doug’s style. But while we were waiting outside for the service to end (my kids don’t sit still), Will revealed his intentions. “Here, make a paper boat.”

As everyone came out of the service, Will was at the door, handing out post its, asking the adults to make airplanes. There was a surprising variety, and everyone was amused.

Thank God it is Friday.
Our Nanny has been ill all week and what we imagined would be the calmest and cleanest week we’ve had in 4 years was actually one of the harder, dirtier weeks. I’ve swept up a kazillion dried pastas and peppercorns from our many tea parties this week, and still I’m finding them stuck to the sole of my bare feet. I’ve mopped the floors in our kitchen 3 times, but still my feet are black-bottomed with the latest meal to miss Sylvie’s mouth. Oh we clean after she eats, but that Toddler has quite an arm on her, and I’m regularly finding food particles where I never would have checked. Anyway, nothing dirties a house faster than cabin fever, which we’ve had all week as 1/2 of the family works and works at entertaining the homebound little. This was one of those weeks I kept my ear peeled for Ed McMahan’s giant check rapping against my front door, as I had fun, it just would have been more pleasant for all of us if Doug and I weren’t also balancing full time jobs.

Will arrived home this afternoon, so we started readying for his arrival this morning. Sylvie and I hung banners around the living room, and I baked the Caramel Cake from Birthday Cakes: Recipes and Memories from celebrated bakers

I explained to Will that I needed his help frosting the cake, and he asked me “What day is it?”
“Friday” I responded. “It’s not my birthday? What is the cake for?” We’re having cake to celebrate Will’s return! He was so excited and I swear every other sentence out of his mouth was “Put fire on it” (candles)

Will’s welcome home cake. With fire on it.

They are born womanizers. I was wearing a skirt at the grocery store the other day, and Will kept brushing his hand up against my legs and falling on the floor to look up my skirt. I told him to knock it off, eventually tossing him in the cart, where he blurts out, “You wearing underwear, mommy?”

For the curious, I most certainly was!

Thanks to people like Michael Pollan (author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (Penguin Press, 2006) and “In Defense of Food” (Penguin Press, 2008)), CSAs have become a viable option to keep our local small organic growers in business. We belonged to Eatwell Farms for a little over a year, not renewing as we received a few hundred too many potatoes and onions for our diet. (I was beginning to feel like The Potato Eaters) I’ve been anxious to join another CSA as the concept of supporting local farmers helps me sleep at night and nothing forces you to incorporate more fruits and veggies into your diet like a weekly cornucopia arriving on your front porch. I also think it is important in this world of fast food and packaged goods to teach my children where food really comes from. We don’t maintain much of a kitchen garden because I haven’t taken the time to figure out what will grow on our rather shady lot, but they get a decent education at the farmer’s markets we frequent. The weekly box is another segue into the “real food” conversation with the kids. We’re also lucky to be surrounded by as many “pick yer own” farms as grocery stores, providing additional opportunities to educate the kids on good food once the littlest is old enough to be trusted NOT to trample the crops or eat an unweighable amount of the picked yer own before buying. But back to the CSA, I think it is probably most influential for them to see us get as excited about our weekly box of farm goodies as they get about Christmas.

SFGate had an article talking about the CSA movement and mentioning a few in the neighborhood. Some that I am interested in:
FrogHollow – Fruit only.
RiverDogFarm
Full Belly Farm
Terra Firma Farms

Michael Pollan speaking at Google:

Well, actually, it’s all of California.
Oh to wake to find your recently washed car covered in fine grains of ash!

Our local liberal media, SFGate, published a map of the significant fires in California, as identified by the Governator’s office (and actually, that they borrowed from the Govnr’s site). As of this morning, I counted 26 significant fires, and the map is constantly updating. Apparently, we don’t have enough fire fighters to sufficiently man so many fires, so all the talk on the radio over the past week has been about triaging these. Thankfully, we don’t live in a fire prone corridor, but looking at the map, you’d think we were the only ones in the state.

On our drive home from Tahoe, we passed 4 fires. One of them had turned the sky a charred black outlined in firey red – like judgement day – and I kept waiting for the hand of god to emerge through the clouds.