Summer, Finally

Thank you so much: for the clam shack recs (Bob's in Kittery! Awesome, Kiki, thanks. And, Karen, the Clam Shack in Kennebunkport, where we went on a kind of seafood-sandwich pilgrimage last week, having not been there since I was pregnant with Ben and hormonally transported by the lobster roll there. Turns out it wasn't just the hormones.) and the doll clothes enthusiasm (please write or link if you make some) and the wishes for sun and fun. We had such a wonderful two weeks of vacation--visiting friends in New Hampshire and Maine, and then camping on Cape Cod--it's a little hard to re-enter real life, and I find myself blinking the way you do when you come out of the cool dark of a movie theater into the brightness of an actual, unpretend afternoon. I hope you are enjoying everything there is to be enjoyed right now.

Meanwhile, over at family.com, I've posted a column about an incredible, bacon-y potato salad, and, also, about an incredible, un-bacon-y bowl of grains and vegetables, which you should try, even if you're revolted by or skeptical about the very idea of quinoa. If you're revolted *and* skeptical, maybe skip it.

I will post just a tiny few pictures here. Rest assured there was plenty of rain and emergency gas-station bathroom stops. Oh, but mostly, it was so lovely. The kids are such *kids*. These are summers they're going to remember.

New Hampshire was all about kayaking. Also, playing Bananagrams with our friends.


And Maine is for sailing. This is Biscuit, our friend Gordon's beautiful boat. We were right by Acadia National Park, and every second of every day was sky and water and blueberries.


Every second, that is, that the kids weren't playing the "picking game" indoors with a Playmobil catalogue. Do your kids do this? Sit for hours and hours deciding what they would get on every page, if they could get anything they wanted? All very dreamy and longing-filling, like they're little window-shopping Orphan Annies with their cheerful, deprived faces pressed to the glass? Beware if they ask you to play, though: they're very strict. "Oh, Mama, sorry--you can't get that whole set, only the animals from it." "But if it's just for imagining, can't I get anything I want?" "Oh, yeah, um, you'd think so, but no."

We spent one night in Ogunquit, since the beaches in Northern Maine somewhat elude the children, what with their wild and freezing pebblyness.


And then the Cape. I love this picture of Birdy and her friend Harry, like some kind of surfers 'wedding ceremony. Dude, I pledge to keep my board tied to yours *forever.* Or at least until we hear the clang of the ice cream truck.


The campfire always returns Birdy to my lap. I think she imagines that I can keep the smoke out of her eyes, and I have done nothing to dissuade her from this idea. Oh, Birdy. Stay right there.

Warm and Smoky Potato Salad

We interrupt this quinoa special with a word from our sponsor, The Bacon Lady. I know, it's a little helter-skelter, this food column, what with a recipe for bran timbales one week and marshmallow-Cheezit balls the next, but that's a little bit how it is around here. And bacon? Well. I'm sure I don't need to go on and on about bacon's charisma and magnetism. Either you eat bacon, and understand this perfectly well, or you don't eat bacon but remember it still, sighingly, in your dreams. If we were boating home together after the Trojan War, you would need to plug up your noses with beeswax and tie me to the mast of the ship so that I would not fling myself overboard at the first whiff of the siren song of the bacon smell (While smoked meat does not make an explicit appearance in Homer's Odysseus, it is widely believed, by me, that the sirens are a metaphor for the smell of bacon frying.) Turn the heat up under a pan of bacon, and the children will stagger into the kitchens, their arms leading the way like those of ravenous zombies.

Which is not to say that bacon is the key to my own loving of potato salad, because I am a nearly whorishly indiscriminate lover of potato salad. I love the potato salad my mom makes, which is similar to this one but (gasp) without the bacon. I love the potato salad to which we became addicted when Michael and I were still vegetarians, and not even (yet) the bacon-eating kind of vegetarians: the potato salad with chipotle-lime vinaigrette from the utterly fantastic Field of Greens cookbook--a potato salad that is still consistently requested of me at potlucks, and that is a little too spicy for most children, leaving more for the sane rest of us. And I love the classic kind of potato salad with mayonnaise and lots of hard-boiled eggs chopped into it and sometimes sugar even. Oh I love that kind. At the lake house we were just visiting, our friend's mother made a gigantic bowl of this very kind of potato salad--it was to be for dinner--and then left to spend the day golfing while we peeled back the plastic wrap and studied the salad and tried to figure out if we could tunnel under the beautiful garnish of egg wedges and paprika and dig some out for our lunch without anybody being any the wiser, which, no, we could not.

I'm running this particular recipe, though, because the bacon is a great lure for skeptical children, like a smoky worm wiggling out from the hook of potato salad, and most kids can be persuaded to harbor a serving on their plates if only to pick off and eat the bacon, which is, at least, a start. (I was going to call bacon the "gateway to potato salad" but then dimly recalled that I'd already called it a gateway to something else, and so Googled "Catherine Newman bacon gateway" and got 306 hits. I guess bacon is the gateway to all kinds of thing!) Also, because the onions are briefly sautéed and marinated, the kids won't have to fear any inadvertent chomping into the spicy crunch of raw onions. Not that they love the onions this way either--but at least these can be discreetly piled to the side of one's plate (see photo) without contaminating everything in their oniony path.

If you are not (yet) a bacon eater, go ahead and make this, but substitute olive oil for the bacon fat, and add a teaspoon of smoked paprika or chipotles. It will still be delicious. Plus, swapping righteousness in for porky crunch is a pretty good trade-off, as I recall.

Warm and Smoky Potato Salad

The measurements are somewhat approximate here, which means that it is as important as ever to taste the salad--as you're making it and before you serve it--to make sure that it is adequately salted and seasoned. Should I write a cookbook and call it Not Undersalted Foods? Maybe. (Note: if you are vegetarians, make this potato salad instead.)

2-3 pounds Yukon gold potatoes, washed, then halved and/or quartered (halve the smaller ones and quarter the larger ones; you can leave the wee babies whole)

Kosher Salt

1/3-1/2 pound sliced bacon

1 red onion, halved and thinly sliced

1/2 cup cider vinegar

1 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1/4 cup (or so) chopped parsley

A few snips of chives, if you've got them

In a medium pot, cover the potatoes with a few inches of cold water, then salt the water heavily (when the salt dissolves, the water should taste salty) and bring it to a boil, covered, over high heat. Turn the heat down and simmer the potatoes until tender, around 15-20 minutes. The only way this won't be good--besides your stubbornly refusing to salt it sufficiently--is if the potatoes are undercooked. You know what I mean, when you take a bite and there is still a resistant something in the potato's heart of hearts. I am always more in danger of overcooking the potatoes, but then again, I don't actually care if they fall apart a little bit while I'm making the salad. Drain the potatoes and leave them in the colander to cool off and dry out for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, in a very wide skillet, fry the bacon over medium heat, turning as required, until it is crisp. Drain it on paper towels and evaluate the fat left behind: you want about a third of a cup; if you've got less, add a bloop or two of olive oil; if you've got more, pour a little off. Add the onions to the fat and stir over medium heat until they are just barely wilted, 2 or 3 minutes. Now add the vinegar, sugar, and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt to the pan and boil two minutes. Whisk in the mustard, and leave the onions to pickle briefly while you dice the potatoes. Dice the potatoes. In a large bowl, use a rubber spatula to combine the warm potatoes with the warm dressing/onion mixture, then taste for seasoning. Does it need more salt? More vinegar? The potatoes will absorb the dressing as they sit, so be sure to taste it again right before serving and re-adjust as needed. If you're not serving it right away, cover the potato salad with plastic wrap, and leave at room temperature. Only refrigerate it if you really must, as the cold will give the potatoes a weirdly leaden and mealy texture. Which is not to say that leftovers aren't good in their way. Just that it's better freshly made.

At serving time, sprinkle the salad with the parsley and chives, then crumble the bacon over the top. Yum.

Baby Doll

Hello, hello! How patient you've been. We are in full summer mode around here, which means our annual trips around the great Northeast (Upstate New York! New Hampshire! We are total jet-setters), scrambling to work when we're home, and lots of projects. I want to write about the fabulous cooperative day camp we ran with friends (this is such a brilliant solution for the cashless and campless), or seeing my nephews, or how profoundly this has become the Summer of Snakes (why is that?). But instead, I'm going to send you to family.com, to my recipes for Asian-style Chicken Salad (man, that is a good salad), and the creamy, dreamy Mango Popsicles that we did, in fact, serve our aforementioned cooperative day campers. I am getting through your requests, though a camp meal? Really? It's going to look so gross, but maybe I should do it anyways.

And because it's what we just spent an evening doing, I wanted to alert you to this fabulous idea that I found on-line, when I was Googling "baby doll clothes free patterns." Thanks to the fabulous "Baby Clothes to Dolls Tutorial" over at a blog called Obsessively Stitching, we spent two dollars on baby clothes at the Salvation Army, and are now well on our way to the lovely, cottony baby-doll wardrobe of Birdy's dreams. And I didn't even have to futz around with a pattern! Not that I didn't jab a pin into my own forearm and say the f-word. Or manage somehow to sew the neck hole closed on my first pass over the sleep sack. Or tear a little hole in the onesie as I was removing the Salvation Army stapled price tag. Or lie down on the floor and say, with one arm flung over my eyes, "My god, enough, I'm done," about *doll clothes*. But still. I am so happy not to have spent the real money on real doll clothes. I am so happy to be rid of the revoltingly pilled nylon nighties that the dolls came with. I am so happy that Birdy's so happy. It was worth every curse.



Tomorrow we leave to visit friends in Maine. Wish us a bon voyage! Send us your clam shack recommendations! Take care of yourselves and have fun! xoxoxo

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

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?