Be Mine

This year's Valentine's Day shirt was based on our new favorite character from this movie. 
I've probably mentioned that I make the kids t-shirts every year. Others have been more classically romantic. . .

This one, made with an old-lace napkin. (Me, choked up over that little Ben face? Don't be silly!)

Or this, made by painting over a doily (see link below).

And every year I feed them yogurt with a heart of raspberries arranged on it.

So Birdy was just little then. Who even cares? [sob]

And I make the table super-fancy. Or as super-fancy as one can get without remembering if there is an iron, and where it might be.

The bad photo quality might make this look depressingly like your grandma's tenement-era apartment.

And I make some sort of a treat.

I have no feelings about this face whatsoever. [sob]

Nothing says "I love you" like root vegetables!

Valentine's Day is my number-one favorite holiday of the year! It is possibly the only holiday that never, ever results in me tantruming around the house referring to such things as "the fucking turkey" (as in "Maybe next year you can stick your hand inside the fucking turkey.") or "the fucking teacher gifts" or "the fucking snowflake garland that I have now sewn my sleeve into" or "the fucking oven mitt that is on fire, you asshole." In fact, it could be that I have never once cursed with respect to Valentine's Day! Although, having said that, I admit that it's unlikely to be true.

If you need a quick last minute idea, I've got loads scattered around the internet! Try one of these:

• For truly quick and lovely doily-print t-shirts, click here.
• For PBJ thumbprint heart cookies, click here.
• For our romantic musings on paint colors, click here. (warning: not a useful idea!)
• For my fancy doily-patterned cake, click here.
• For little kids, a Valentine lacing card here.
• For a romantic heart-beet salad, click here.
• And for the oldy-but-goody of Birdy's preschool cards, click here. (warning: not a useful idea!)

Happy Valentine's Day, my sweethearts.

xo

Mid-winter Pursuits

Birdy

Blowing bubbles in the snow. (Have you heard about the snow here? Two feet! The children have grown hunchbacks and long beards since they last went to school.)

And teaching herself to play the guitar, which she is doing beautifully. Ben, meanwhile, is learning the ukulele. This ukulele, in fact, which he bought with his birthday money. If I had a single musical cell in my body, we could have quite the family string band!

Ben

All stop-motion animation all the time. His latest movie is here, and it features his own original ukelele soundtrack! (Don't believe his generous credits; this is really all him now, although, yes, I did wrap that teeny-tiny package, and Birdy did draw the ad.) The rest are all here. You can even subscribe, if you like, which will thrill him no end.

Craney

Watching the snow from the nest of Ben's bed. And also sleeping.

This particular cat posture is called "Bunny Feet."

Me

Blanket-making (Tutorial coming soon! I actually took pictures this time!)

Reading.

My friend Amity's brand-new book, which is harrowing and unforgettable (and--yay!--getting rave reviews all over the place). It's a little like Room, which I also loved, in that it's a story about parenting under duress and you're not sure how you feel about anything. I couldn't put it down.

Eating.

You can't see the jalapenos, but I swear they are in there.

Jalapeno-Cream-Cheese Scrambled Eggs. A new eggy favorite, although the Vinegar Egg is still my truest love. To make this new-comer, beat an egg in a cup with a nice pinch of salt and a teaspoon of cold water. Heat a generous half tablespoon of butter in a small pan over medium-low heat. When it's hot, add the egg to the pan with a tablespoon of cream cheese and a tablespoon of chopped pickled jalapenos (I blot them dry first on a paper towel). Scramble until done to your liking. (Easily doubled.) Yum.

Also nagging everybody about snowy boots and Lego everywhere and, most romantically, Valentines, and why haven't you done them yet? [No photo.]

Michael

Shoveling. And shoveling.

(Thank you, sweetheart! Kiss kiss kiss.)

What are you guys doing? Is it snowy there?

xo

Adobo Carnitas

I have a chicken-wing hangover today, so these photographs are not actually as unbearably tempting as they typically would be.

Meat that has been cooked into submission and is collapsing into succulent shreds might really be my favorite thing to eat in the world. So, if you want me to say something I like about February, besides the spring light of morning, it’s that. Long-cooked meat. It might not sound like much, but it’s good.

Although they are still pretty tempting, actually.

Although, and now this is February speaking through me more sighingly, I am having a little trouble feeding my kids lately, my kids who are bifurcating into a blood-smeared teenaged carnivore—like something out of a vampire movie—and a doe-eyed, leaf-chewing herbivore. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That Ben’s actually going to end up eating Birdy? I know. Thank goodness everybody likes beans is all I can say.

This recipe is so easy and so good. You can cook it in a crock pot and stop at the point where the meat is falling apart, and it’s delicious. I cook chicken legs this way, and also pork chops. Yum. Or, and here’s where things get crazy, you can cook it in a Dutch oven, and then finish it on the stove top, watching closely as the liquid evaporates and the pork starts to brown in its own fat. We call this adobo carnitas, and it is pretty much as good as you can imagine: the vinegar boils away into a profound and tangy sweetness, and the meat goes all crisp-edged, and all that fat you would have skimmed off if you were serving it at the stew stage—well, it all mysteriously “evaporates”! Just like that. It’s gone, so don’t give it another thought.

We eat this in tacos or burritos mostly or, as shown above, in a pile of shreds on a plate.

Edited to add: This is similar, but not identical, to the "Pork So Good It Could Make You Cry," thank you for wondering! The flavor is different (bay/pepper/onion/garlic/vinegar here versus scallion/ginger/sugar/sherry there) even though the sweet/salty succulence is the same.

This is the meat in the crock pot, stopped at the stew point. It is juicy and delicious like this.

Pork Adobo

If you stop at the stew stage, serve this over rice. If you take it all the way to carnitas, eat it in tacos or by itself, since it won’t be saucy any more. As noted above, feel free to swap in chicken legs or thighs (cook these for 2 hours or so) or bone-in pork chops (ditto) and stop at the stew stage.

1 onion, halved and sliced

4 cloves garlic, smashed and peeled

2 bay leaves

¼ teaspoon black peppercorns

4 pounds pork (country ribs, a Boston butt, or a boneless picnic shoulder)

½ cup soy sauce

½ cup white vinegar

1 cup water

Put the onions, garlic, bay leaves, and peppercorns in the bottom of a crock pot or Dutch oven. Add the pork, then pour the liquids over it, cover it, and cook it: in the crock pot, this means high heat for 6 hours or some lower heat for more hours; in the Dutch oven, this means tightly covered in a 325 oven for 4 or so hours, but you’ll need to check it every hour or so make sure there’s still liquid in there. Add water if there’s not.

The pork should be inclined to fall all to pieces—to shred up if you even so much as press it with a wooden spoon. At this point, remove any bones and any obvious solid clumps of fat, skim the surface, and serve over rice.

Or: cook it in on the stove top, in the Dutch oven, over low heat, until all the liquid boils off and the meat starts to fry in its own fat. Watch closely at the end so that it doesn’t burn. Die happy.

You probably already have everything but the pork. 

If your pork comes with those weird stretchy undies that keep the maxipad in place after you have a baby in the hospital--just remove them! 

Shouldn't you brown the pork and onions? No! Easy, right? 

Everybody gets really well acquainted in here. There won't be enough liquid to cover, but it doesn't matter.

A different meal, cooking it to the carnitas phase in the Dutch oven.

Fake Fake-Fancy Fake-French Fromage

I am kind of agnostic when it comes to cheese. Or maybe polytheistic. Overall, I love it. All the basics, like cheddar, blue cheese, Monterey Jack, parmesan, mozzarella, feta. And then some of those lovely, expensive cheeses that I seek out at parties or splurge on for holidays (Humboldt Fog, say, or a beautiful piece of aged gouda). But then there are some difficult, complicated cheeses that I wish I liked—given that I like pretty much everything—but I don’t. Maybe there’s a pee smell or a barn smell, or the rind tastes kind of like moldy oven cleaner, and I want to understand it, I do. But I am too busy choking on the ammonia fumes or glugging from my glass of wine to wash away the goat's-asscrack aftertaste. I even, I admit, would twitch my nose and bewitch the rind off of plain old brie if I could. But I eat it because I am too polite to scrape the good gooey middle out and leave behind the emptily sagging white outside, like some people do (cough *Dad* cough).

Cabot makes my favorite cheddar and Monterey Jack, but I don't actually love their yogurt. I can't remember how we ended up with it.

There are also some kinds of grody cheeses that I crave secretly, like Velveeta microwaved with salsa, which I will eat all of, down to the scraping up of the dregs of waxy cooling cheese with my thumbnail once all the chips are gone. Boursin, which is a garlicky, creamy cheese spread that is “French,” in quotes, even though it really is from France, is kind of in the middle. I tasted it for the first time as a teenager at a friend’s house, and died a little from my own sophistication. I’ve eaten it only occasionally as an adult, though, because it is actually insanely expensive ($7 for 5 ounces!). But I still love it, and the kids love it (we ate it in Quebec), and I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to recreate. And you know what? It’s not! I’m making it all the time right now. The only trick is to use garlic powder. That’s what gives it its special fake-fancy flavor. Seriously. And you’ll notice that it’s creamy but not, like the real kind is, simultaneously creamy and crumbly. But I can live with that.

 

Boursin-style Cheese Spread

It’s quite possible that you’re going to think to yourself, “Oooh, this would be so much better with…” fresh garlic say, or fresh herbs, or rosemary, and I say: Go for it. Because that means you don’t actually want it to taste like fake fake-fancy fake-French cheese, and that’s a perfectly reasonable way to feel.

4 ounces cream cheese or, ideally, Neufchatel (which is less gummy), softened

1 tablespoon butter, softened

2 tablespoons plain Greek yogurt

½ teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1 teaspoon dried dill

½ teaspoon garlic powder

large pinch each dried marjoram and dried thyme (or one or the other)

Black pepper

Use a standing mixer fitted with the paddle (or else a food processor or a wooden spoon and strong biceps) to beat together the cream cheese and butter until completely whipped and amalgamated. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well. Taste and add more of anything you think it needs. Serve with bread or crackers.

I SWEAR this is probably the last gross thing I'll post. For right now.

We spent our snow day doing a little claymation (thanks again, Unbored!), and this movie was the result. It's like Davey and Goliath. But crossed with Jackass.

The children have been doing stop-motion animation for months, and their independent work is wholesome and lovely: lego gift-giving scenarios, paper circles cutting themselves into snowflakes, stuffed cats rolling over. But for some reason, as soon as I got involved. . .

Stay warm! Have a lovely weekend.

xo

Emetic Hobos. . .

. . . is how, on facebook, the autocorrect of a friend of a friend kept revising "emetophobia." Good garage-band name? Bad Halloween costume?

Playmobil stylings courtesy of the fabulous KJ  Dell'Antonia. Who sent me an email, with the subject-heading "barf picture," that I avoided all day.

My little essay on that grave condition, and on barfing in general, is up at the Times here. If you're a long-timer with me, I'm so sorry to be talking about barf again. But at least, just this once, there's no weirdly-associated recipe! While the piece was in the pipeline over the weekend, both Ben and my editor got stomach bugs. We took to calling it "The Haunted Essay of Contagion."

Jicama with Spicy Lime Dipping Salt

I hesitate to say this because I saw, on pinterest, a comment about my Crack Broccoli that was like, "Really--kids ate this over cupcakes????? Please." But I am going to anyway: at a party, we ran out of jicama and spicy lime dipping salt before we ran out of chicken wings and grape-jelly meatballs and cheesecake bites. And, just to be clear, it was not a party we threw for, say, a spa manager or Kate Moss. This is just wildly, shockingly good. The jicama is sweet and supercrunchy and green-bean tasting, and the dipping salt is spicy and limey and perfect. Kids love this; grown-ups love this; you will love it too, I almost promise.

If you have never bought a jicama before, buy one now. It will be in the supermarket near the other root vegetables that you scuttle nervously past: the scary yucca and tarro and Jerusalem artichokes. It is brown and and leathery and, at this time of year, a little beat-up looking. But then it will be refreshingly crisp and pretty inside. If you can't find, or are too afraid of, the jicama, try the dipping salt with watermelon. Yum.

For some reason, I couldn't help imagining that my jicama had a bad personality. What? You don't look so great yourself, lady.  Or maybe I was feeling bad because, on top of all its other aesthetic problems, there was the fact that I dropped it in the driveway when I was getting out of the car.

Phbbbt! I'm not the only one with a whisker growing out of my mole!

But it's like a geode. A vegetal root geode. Inside, it is creamy white and gorgeous. Actually, quite deep inside. With this bad fellow, I had to pare away a great deal of skin and fibrous and oddly tan flesh before I got to the good part. This is more of a paring-knfie situation than a vegetable-peeler one.

Spicy Lime Dipping Salt

A few things. You're going to be like, "Why the sugar?" And why the sugar is that, otherwise, it is really too salty when you dip into it. But feel free to try it that way, if you want to. You can, of course, vary the amount of cayenne to suit your taste, or you can try something else spicy (I go back and forth on chipotle here, since I actually find the smokiness a little distracting). And the citric acid. I know. But it's the only dry way I know to add a little tartness to something. Mine came from a brewers' supply store, but you can order it online or, possibly, get it at the supermarket.

1 tablespoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt)

1 tablespoon sugar

¼ teaspoon cayenne

1/8 teaspoon citric acid (optional)

The finely grated zest of 1 scrubbed lime

In a mortar and pestle (or another grinding device of your choosing), grind all the ingredients together until finely powdered.

Serve with peeled jicama cut into narrow strips or with watermelon or cantaloupe cubes.

I got my mortar and pestle at Marshall's for $10, and I am in love with it.

Dr. Pepper Caviar

After a sublime frozen-yogurt experience involving popping boba--picture passion-fruit-flavored fish eggs--Ben and I have become somewhat obsessed with the process of spherification, as they call it in the strange and foamy field of molecular gastronomy. So we gave him this kit for Christmas.

Which is weird, I know, since I am also, obviously, somewhat obsessed with natural and healthy eating.

Still, there was a half bottle of Dr. Pepper in the fridge that wasn't going to spherify itself. And so we spherified it.

We used actual Dr.-Pepper-brand Dr. Pepper! Not Dr. Pimper. Not Mr. Plipper. Not Popper-Pooper MD.  Although I think you could really use anything. Or anything that's not too acidic, apparently.

Soda spawn.

And we had as much fun as a family could possibly have with soda and meth-lab equipment. The directions that came with the kit were actually kind of crappy, so we followed these instead. Also, we needed to borrow a drug-dealer very precise scale from our friend Sam. All worth it. They won't tell you anywhere how to make gigantic Dr. Pepper boogers. Which is okay, because you'll surely figure it out yourself!

I never feel like a better mother than when my kids are doing mind-bogglingly disgusting things. Is that weird?

More soon, including (seriously) a good and wholesome vegetable recipe.

xo

What is wrong with me? Seriously.

Because you'd think I could fulfill a simple holiday wish. . . 

As seen at Barnes and Noble.

without turning everyone's Christmas into Night of the Living Porn Cupcakes.

As seen in Jugs magazine.

I know I don't need to remind you about Pinata-gate 2005.

Raise your hand if you nursed until you were three and thought a pair of red pompoms looked just right!

If your child was here for that particular candy-filled-boobs party, again, I'm so sorry.

Otherwise, our holiday has been OUTRAGEOUS. Old friends, really old friends, hard cider, grandparents, ham, jigsaw puzzles, not working, red wine, snow, candlelight, games, movies, snow, ham, egg nog, rum balls, Ben barfing, jigsaw puzzles, music, ham, snow, napping, cat, fighting with Michael about whether the kids need to wear helmets for sledding in the woods because yes, I'm sorry, they do. Like that.

Yesterday I brewed a big pot of vanilla tea, and we all wrote all of our thank-you notes with the snow falling dreamily past our windows like we were in a Normal Rockwell painting of ourselves. Heaven on earth. Our gratitude abounds.

Happy New Year, dear ones. 

xo