Ranch Dressing and Father's Day

My ranch dressing recipe is up over at family.com.

Which has nothing to do, not really, with our celebration of this

hard-rockin'


kid-cuddling


board-game losing


marathon-running


colonial heart-breaking


deliciously aging


love-of-my-life baby daddy.

There is an excellent recipe for ribs over at family.com: it takes a long time, but it does this quite independently with almost no hand-holding on your part. Yum yum yum. Also, donut cake. Because you were wanting to make donut cake, weren't you?

Of course, I want to be the kind of blogger who posts gorgeous pictures without detracting from them with self-ironizing commentary. I want to be all, like, sure, a "summer" pennant--hardly worth mentioning! But please. I made that while the kids were at their last day of school and then practically waited by the door for them to get home--and then when they finally arrived, they both had friends with them and headed straight upstairs without noticing. "Did you see the banner? Did you?" I asked, after following them up, because I am five years old. And so, because they are good kids, they bolted back down and said, "Wow, Mama!" and "That's *so* nice!" and I felt like I was about as big as a deer tick.

And the peonies. "Did you see the peonies?" I ask everyone as they arrive. And if they didn't, then I have to take them by the hand and lead them back outside to look. I just can't believe we have peonies in our own yard, can't believe our good luck and beautiful lives. "Look!" I keep saying in a million ways. "Can you *believe* that?" Love and joy be with you!

June

Hello, dear friends! I hope this Tuesday finds you well and happy. I am writing with a couple of new food columns over at family.com. I am just going to link to the landing page since the site is under transition. But over there you will find excellent recipes for hummus and banana muffins. Do you want to check in again, when you get a chance, about wish-list recipes? Someone mentioned pasta salad, and I'm going to do that one soon. But please let me know if there are others. I've been in a real phase of "Oh god--it's already 6. What do we have in the house?" Hence all the chickpeas.

Another thing: the cooking class at Love to Cook is going to be rescheduled for the fall, as a number of people who were hoping to come in June can't make it. So I will look forward to seeing you then!

Meanwhile, our lives have taken a turn for the summery. We spent a gloriously green weekend at my parents' house in upstate New York, where we took a favorite walk that meanders past an old hunting perch.

Ben kept saying, "Wow, I remembered this being so much bigger and taller!" which really cracked me up. Sometimes the children seem to be reading from scripts about growing up. And Birdy spent some time down below, gathering her courage for the ascent, which she eventually made. You go, Birdy.


We also had a chance to troll through my parents' attic--a favorite activity. The results were a two-day-long game of Risk (I don't love the war theme, and I had to opt out since, just as I remembered, that game makes me so competitive that I practically punched Michael in the face, but boy is that 1963 board gorgeous) and also some very ancient deck chairs that we schlepped home to revamp.

I hope your lives are every bit as minutely thrilling as ours.

xo

More Spring!

The spring is so fully here that it is starting to be gone. One evening our dogwood looked like this:



And then in the morning, after a night of rainy wind, the ground beneath it looked like this:


Meanwhile, we continue to eat springishly. Over at family.com, I have posted one recipe for a simply excellent frittata.


And one for delectable rhubarb crumb bars.


And, speaking of, er, food and recipes: I am going to be teaching a cooking class! In Logan, Utah! At the fabulously friendly Love to Cook cookware store. Friday June 12th, and Saturday June 13th. Don't you want to come? I figure we can all stay in the same hotel and drink beer in the hot tub! If there's a hot tub and you like beer! Anyways, if you have any friends in Utah, please do let them know.

Finally, thank you for all your school-auction support and advice. It was a beast, but a fun one--and I swooned a million times over when Michael's band played. Did I tell you he was playing guitar in a band? He winked at me from the stage during "Superman," that old REM song, and my knees buckled. Sigh.

xo

Asparagus and Salmon



New recipes are here and here.

You guys were so funny and nice about Ben's Mad Lib. I read him some of the comments and he said, "Wow, that makes me feel almost *famous*." Also, he was kind of scandalized by himself.

Meanwhile, I am running our kids' school fund-raising auction with my friend Maddie. Have you ever run a fund-raising auction? It's like planning a wedding. The kind of wedding where you also have to sell 300 items to your guests. 300 items that you first had to sleaze around town begging for. Not that I ever threw a wedding, mind you, though that is doubtless the kind I would throw. All I can say is: we have drunk many glasses of wine. So bear with me until next week, when it will all be over.

Enjoy the lilacs, the dogwoods, the violets. . . sigh.

Six and Nine

Do you ever come upon little things that just so perfectly capture who your children are at this exact moment? Like this cozy little scene on the kitchen floor:


Or this, after Ben's friend Ava had been over for a play date:

I knew this day would come. "vomitish turdling"! I also confess to loving "skinny pooping in the old swimming penis."

Meanwhile (excuse this dubious transition): chocolate pudding! A delicious recipe!

Enjoy the rest of your week.

xo

Books

Okay, I am late to link over to family.com, so let me start there. Whole-wheat Pasta with Chickpeas and Lemon. This is one of those recipes that takes a small assortment of humble, inexpensive ingredients and turns them into something quite fantastic. Plus, butt peas. Is all I'm saying.

Also, I have a piece about, of all things, rhubarb in this month's O magazine.

Meanwhile, you guys have been very actively recommending books back and forth for Suzannah's four-year-old--thank you so much--and it's so fun to see some old familiars and some new ones. I've been thinking about this all week, and am going to make a list here. Four is young, I think; I found very few books at that age that felt right, but then again my kids could really not handle any degree of suspense until a bit later.

Happy Little Family by Rebecca Caudill. Do you know this book? It is a very gentle story about a, uh, happy little family, set in the early 1900s. The main character is Bonnie, who'd four, and the most suspenseful thing that happens is she leaves her knit cap up on the mountain by mistake, and then goes back to retrieve it. Shiver me timbers!

Abel's Island by William Steig. This is an ideal first chapter book, especially if your kids are already huge William Steig picture book fans (Amos and Boris, Gorky Rises, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. . . ) like mine were (and are). A mouse Abel is separated from his wife and stranded on a island after a storm. He has a few adventures--full of Steig's characteristic descriptive flair and existential musings--and then returns safely home. (Dominic, another Steig chapter book, is not as gentle and has robbers in it.)

Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne. This is the original and it is so, so good and so fun to read--all the British quaintisms tumbling around in your mouth like pebbles--that I simply cannot recommend it enough. So, so different from the Pooh-branded crap that came later--all that "Pooh and his friends found the Easter egg and laughed and laughed and hugged each other and Rabbit said, 'Easter is always more fun with friends' and everybody cried a little from happiness" that makes you want to kill yourself.

James Herriot's Treasury for Children. This is the book we gave as a birthday gift to friends when the children were small. It's a beautifully illustrated hardcover collection of an English vet's animal stories--a rescued kitten, a lost lamb--and it's not technically a chapter book, but makes a good bridge over to them. Later, when the kids are ten, eleven, twelve, you can introduce them to the James Herriot adult books (All Creatures Great and Small, etc.), which I adored, and not only because he always had his hand up the coochie of some or other laboring ewe.

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren. Full disclosure: I did not love, love, love reading this book for some reason--I found it strangely boring. However, the children loved hearing it, and I love the idea of it, and so I am including it here. The kids could simply not get over what a little independent badass Pippi was, and that alone was the price of admission. (Now, another lesser-known Astrid Lindgren book, The Brothers Lionheart, may be my all-time favorite kids' chapter book, but it's a book for ten-year-olds.)

Stuart Little by E.B. White. Many of you mentioned Charlotte's Web, which is a beautiful book, and the truth is that I plunged right ahead with it when Ben was little, forgetting all about how its main preoccupation is DEATH, with a capital d-e-a-t-h, and it went really badly. Stuart Little, about the tiny adventures of a mouse, was more everybody's speed until later.

For a little later--maybe five and six--I have a ton of recommendations: the Little House books (especially, as Cathy K mentioned, On the Banks of Plum Creek. Also Farmer Boy, which makes me hungry just thinking about it. A dish of baked beans with bacon melting into it. . . With some of the others, we had to do a lot of ad hoc editing, especially around the descriptions of Native Americans, which you can't discuss critically with them until they're older, I felt, and so need to be altered). The Moffats, and many other Eleanor Estes books, such as Ginger Pye and The Witch Family). All of the Roald Dahl books (BillyJoe: he was a nazi, like, literally?), but especially James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and the incomparably fantastic Danny the Champion of the World which occasioned more philosophical questions about good and bad than any other book we've read before or since. Also the All-of-a-kind Family series (until it gets too teenagery in the later books), about a family of Jewish sisters growing up in early-20th-century New York. Oh I really could go on an on. . .

But, speaking of great books: you should consider buying two books recently published by friends of mine!

Mabel One and Only

by my beloved friend Margaret Muirhead (with whom I worked in a sandwich restuarant 20 years ago in San Francisco) about a super-creative and stubborn girl (oh, maybe it's about *me*, ha ha) who gets her way in the best possible sense. It's fantastic.

And, for you baseball fans out there, The Super Sluggers: Slumpbuster


by Kevin Markey, who is fabulous in his own rights but is known around my house mostly for being the husband of my best friend from college. This is such a perfect book for sports-loving kids (I am told, not being the parent of one myself, but knowing lots and lots of them). Check it out.

And, finally, I can't help recommending this as a mother's day gift (Mom, don't look):


Because I Love Her edited by Andrea Richesin. And not just--but partly--because I have an essay in it.

Also, this little book always makes a great Mother's Day gift, even years and years after it was published since the author still hasn't gotten another book out there just yet:


Which is, actually, the same book as this:


So, it's kind of like two books, right?

xo