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

Happy Passover! Happy Easter! Recipe for one fabulous egg dish here, and another here.
Hope you have fun hiding the matzo or the eggs--or whatever else you do to celebrate with your family and friends.

xo

Wild Weather

Last night thunder ripped across the sky and the trees shook down to their roots and the rain pelted the greening world and I thought: Spring! Our first honest-to-goodness thunderstorm of the season. Thrilling. And the perfect whether for macaroni and cheese, the perfect recipe for which is up over here, at family.com. But before the last of the snow has melted in the mountains, I can't resist showing you Ben and Ava's consolation-prize-winning homemade sled entry in the Berkshire East's Cardboard Classic. Those kids. I'm telling you.

Vernal Equinox

Oh don't you love the spring? And the word vernal? It just has the greenest sound to it, even though that's probably because I'm mixing it up with verdant. But still. The hyacinths are pushing out the ground like alien pod life, and the cardinals are flirting in the forsythia (everyone in my family calls the female my "girlfriend," and says teasingly, "Hey Mama, your girlfriend's at the feeder!), and the evenings are long and lit. It is a glorious time. So maybe (brace yourself for the lame segue), you were thinking of making biscuits? Have I got the recipe for you!

I also wanted to say something here, which is this: I love FamilyFun magazine. I do. I have been writing for them since 1992, when, as my friend Ann and I love to recall over a few drinks, I sent in my bird-feeder prototype, and the tester who unwrapped it promptly cut her hand open on the decorations I'd cut from a Coke can. Classy! (Note: I have refined my ideas over the years. I swear.) Every year I look forward to writing the Valentine's feature; every year I look forward to making the April Fool's Day gag meal for the kids (last year it was meatloaf-and-mashed-potato "pie"! Bwa-ha-ha.); every year I get birthday cake ideas and holiday ideas and craft and game ideas. And I am only mentioning this here, now, because look--I know it's a totally different magazine from Wondertime, and nobody is as heartbroken about Wondertime as I am (with 1 or 2 possible exceptions), but if you open up your mind to FamilyFun, you might just love it. That's all I'm saying. Even though I know it's annoying to get that "Oh, by the way, we switched magazines on you!" card in the mail (I actually got one too! I was like: Yes, hello missing livelihood, I noticed.).

To inspire you: the dinner "pie" (tinted with beet juice!). I made the kids real strawberry pie for dessert so they wouldn't feel tricked in the bad way.

Who knew

That I looked like a cross between Abe Vigoda and Steve Landesberg in Barney Miller?

Here is Birdy's drawing:


Three faces are her doll Bitty Baby, and one is me. Can you guess which is which? When she was done, she squinted at it critically for a moment, tapping the pencil against her pressed-together lips, then added one more line to my forehead, and exhaled: "Perfect!" I'm submitting this drawing to Blue Cross when I make my case for why they should pay for Botox.


Meanwhile: perfect oatmeal cookies are here. I hope you are all well and thriving!

xo

I Won

the "The World's Most Beautiful Readers" contest, and my prize was you.

I don't know how to describe the experience of seeing all of your faces on facebook--this uncanny feeling of recognition, and yet so many of you I've never laid eyes on before. It was totally moving, utterly uplifting. Thank you so much. I really had no idea. I looked at you and your puppies and your babies and your bellies and your backyards and your cupcakes and your kids and your partners, and I was amazed. By what nice hair you all see to have, for one. And by your cats, many of whom could stand to lose a little weight, no? And mostly by your smiles. What a wild ride. Loretta, thank you again.

Okay, onto other matters, like more chicken, here. This is a foolproof and uproariously delicious recipe. You will not even need to clean your stove afterwards! But you may wake up thirsty in the night.

Speaking of waking up thirsty in the night: Birdy is sick again. With a fever again. She woke crying in the night, asking shakily but politely after "some ice cold water, please" and then would wake again periodically to say, "Mama, could you please pass me my ice cold water," which I found totally heartbreaking. Trader Joe's Mango & Cream Bars are our saving grace right now.


xo

The Face of Six

Birdy is 6 today. Birdy. My baby. Lots of you were pregnant at the same time as me, and you are doubtless feeling this too, this head-shaking kind of how-did-it-happen soaring and aching of the heart. Oh!

Here she is, with the doll's sleeping bag that our dear friend made for her. There's something so funny and sweetly old-fashioned about this picture. You'd never know that just one minute later she hiked up her dress and wagged her bottom at me, sing-songing, "Look at my bu-utt, look at my bu-utt." Such a delicate flower, that Birdy.

In other news, there is a facebook "fan" page up! Or maybe it is a "group" page? I don't know. Thank you so much, Loretta Craveiro who is not, I swear, *me* or even someone that I know personally. I am not sure what will happen over there, but I am grateful.

And in other other news, there are roasted chickpea snacks here, for all you salty-snack cravers out there who want something healthier than Cool Ranch Doritos. (When they discover that Cool Ranch Doritos are actually healthy, I will be eating them three meals a day.) We're brainstorming other seasoning ideas besides the curry powder, which is delicious, but not for everyone. Please let me know if you try anything delicious.

Enjoy the snow, if you're out here with us. Or whatever brightness comes your way!

xo

I Thought You'd Never Ask!

Anne Russell has kindly indulged me by asking after the puzzle. Oh, this old thing? This thing that represents senselessly wasted weeks of my life? Voy-la:


Michael read something recently about how it's great to play board games with your children precisely because they're so pointless: it communicates to your kids a desire to spend time with them for no other reason than to spend time with them. Of course, that totally suits me, given my profound love of board games (Hi-Ho Cherry-O, Chutes and Ladders, and Candyland excepted). But I figure it's the same with puzzles. Only, it's just me. And therefore both narcissistic and schizophrenic. Alas.

Moving on:


Pancakes! The best pancakes in the world. Which I posted, coincidentally, the day before IHOP's famous benefit pancake give-away! The last thing I ate at an IHOP were blueberry blini when I was pregnant with Birdy. And I left them in the parking lot, if you know what I'm saying.

xo

Happy Spring!

Okay, it's not really spring. But I have been repeating, "Look at the gorgeous light!" all week like a Pollyanna parrot.

Did you want to read about how revolting chicken is, followed by a recipe? I thought so! I've got just the thing for you.

And here, just for you, is a photo I excluded from the column. Parsley a little too sparsely. Or maybe not sparsely enough.

Maybe I could spend the 99 cents for a fresh bunch before trying to photograph it? No?

Romance

Oh my gosh, remember Birdy's valentines? Ben was just reminiscing about them and we got to laughing all over again. It seems like only yesterday that she was a chubby almost-four-year-old pummeling her little pals with sentimental snippings of death and devils. And now she's a skinny almost-six-year-old decorating bookmarks with doily bits. "No offense, but do your friends even read?" Ben asked, and although I called him on the tone, he did have a point. But that poor Birdy. She's sick, sick, sick with a fever--the kind where one minute they're lethargically nibbling dry Cheerios from a mug and the next they're lethargically drifting away into a fretful nap that they don't even wake up from when you sneak in to turn off Clifford. That's okay. "I know all these by heart," she'd said earlier about our little DVD of episodes. "They all end with sharing." Indeed.

Please go to family.com for my super-duper fancy-schmancy easy-peasy Valentine's Day recipe. And let them know you were there! They like to know that.


I took this picture just yesterday! Is that the face of a kid who's coming down with something? Actually, maybe it is. The smile doesn't quite make it the rest of the way up her face.

Thank You

As always, thank you. Your indignation over Wondertime's ending was just what I needed. I even forwarded it to all the folks there, because sometimes it feels good to wallow collectively. Your kindness is so helpful, and your words so inspiring. I will, of course, be all right.


Because I've applied for a Two-Thousand-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle Grant from the U.S. government!


Also, a Hanging Out With Birdy Grant. As soon as one of those comes through, we'll be all set!

Meanwhile, here's a new recipe over at Family.com. Remember how you wanted a school lunch recipe? That's what it is. While you're over there, you may notice my little Super Bowl recipe from yesterday; "little" is the operative word. I did not exactly go all out.

Hope you are thriving.

xo Catherine

Silver Linings

I know I can be kind of a Polyanna girl. But this morning? Our car was frozen to the driveway like it was in one of those Crazy Glue commercials from the 70s with that guy's construction helmet cemented to a pylon, and so we walked to school. And in the woods, it was as if the trees had been encased in glass. I have never seen anything quite like it, everything glittering and silver like we were in a magic forest inside a fairy tale. And on the way Ben invited a game called "Light Stepper" where you tried to tread softly to keep yourself atop the crust of snow--and of course the kids could do it, because they are as weightless and agile as cats or angels, while their father and I clomped through up to our knees. An ice storm is so treacherous and just so breathtakingly beautiful.

And so it is, right? Many of you have heard of the Wondertime ending by now, and I can't tell you how much your support means to me. Thank you for your words here, and there, and your thoughts--it's such a gift. I am, like my fellow Wondertime folks, heartbroken and worried and overjoyed to have been a part of something so lovely. These are hard times for so many people, but buoyant ones too. Our Dogwood is encased in ice, and yet the spring buds are there already, glittering like glass beads, shining with promise.

God. Sorry. I am such a wreck.

Meanwhile: tamale pie! It's over at family.com, right here, where my food column will continue live a full and rich life. Please visit.

Take care! Drive carefully! Stay warm.

xo Catherine

p.s. I forgot to mention that I have a short piece in this month's Redbook magazine. About romance. Because you know how romantic I am.

A Long Time Coming

Don't worry, I haven't gone all unromantic on you. I was going to post a photo of the ballroom dancing (oh those smiles I could look at for the rest of my life!) or, to be funny, of the helicopter taking off (see ya!) or of the crowd in joyful tears, like we all were yesterday. But then, today, there is this--and this is what it's all about. We are so blessed.

Meanwhile, for a culinary non sequitur, there is borscht. Here. Plus, there are many more soup recipes in the February issue of Wondertime. Boy was my family eating a lot of soup while we were testing those: "What's for dinner?" was our favorite joke.

Love to you and yours.

xo

New Recipes

Gosh, I'm sorry I haven't written here in so long! I've been really, really busy.


But I do have two new recipes up at wondertime--one for corn chowder and one for a puffy oven pancake. They're both here.

There's something a little funky going on at family.com, where you can only see the two most recent recipes. But the whole archive is still up at wondertime, here.

Check in this week if you can--about what recipes you've tried, what's working, what you'd like to see more of. (First I wrote "more or less of," but then I worried that I was really courting your irritation with, say, photos of my kids in their pajamas or my various exhortations about salt.) And post over at wondertime if you're able. I'm always grateful for that.

I hope you're all settling happily into what feels like the "real" winter to me--that stretch after the holidays when it is all about the snow and the ice and the bright blue sky. Soon we'll smash our gingerbread houses with a hammer: a ritual that marks the official end of something here. (Our sanity, maybe?)

xo Catherine

Leftovers

Have your holidays been marvelous? Ours have. I have hardly even noticed the wax from the menorah candles splashing onto my freshly painted windowsill and leaving colored waxy dents in the smooth white. Ahem.

But otherwise, it's been love and joy and ham around here. The ham recipe is up at wondertime over here.

Soon, we'll be taking the tree down. Sigh. But until then, we'll enjoy our family's rich and varied history. Ahem.

Love and joy to you. xoxo

Happy Everything to You

Dear ones, there are new columns up at wondertime: Dinner Beans, for an unphotogenically humble meal, and Maple Snow Taffy, for an outrageous winter treat.

And my favorite holiday card outtakes, below--not the weird half-shut-eye ones, but the ones that just perfectly express who the kids are.

Wishing you peace and joy, health and happiness, and a new year filled with love.

xo