Dionne Ford just wants five minutes to work on her novel. Here’s how her day begins:

Every morning starts at a deficit. The day has not even begun, and I’m already behind. I hear shouting: “I want to take a shower!” “I don’t want to take a shower!” “I need to take a shower!” “Get up!” It could be my husband. It could be one of my daughters. It could be my subconscious. I mean to get up before them all, to sit quietly and listen for guidance for the day, some instruction that will steel me when my plans all go to hell.

Click on over to Literary Mama to see if she ever gets those five minutes.

We never know when we’re going to enjoy a hit of real, fogless summer, but we’re in the midst of it now: all the doors and windows open, me in a sundress, the boys in shorts, and grilled pizza for dinner. Yum!

4 May 1997: chocolate chip banana bread for a hike on Mt. Tamalpais, Tony’s and my first (blind) date

October 1998: Caesar salad pizza, eaten to the accompaniment of Don Ho recordings and tree toad croakings, while on vacation in Maui

September 1999: margarita pizza and champagne at the Oakville Grocery in Healdsburg to celebrate our engagement

July 2000: butternut squash ravioli in brown butter, spinach salad with fresh raspberries, and an amaretto-infused wedding cake

September 2001: mushroom ravioli, spinach and pear salad with candied walnuts and blue cheese, and chocolate bread pudding, a comfort-foods dinner for friends after the 9/11 attacks

April 2002: asparagus and mushroom fajitas at Chevy’s with 5-week old Ben, our first restaurant meal as a family of three

April 2003: poached salmon with dill sauce, steamed green beans with lemon zest and slivered almonds, and lemon tart – an Easter picnic I made at home and carried to the hospital where Tony’s mom was undergoing cancer treatment

September 2004: tiny servings of extra-sharp cheddar cheese, cherry tomatoes and ice water (while Tony and Ben eat proper meals) during the first trimester of a queasy pregnancy

May 2005: pancakes at the Volunteer Fireman’s Breakfast in downtown Mill Valley, our first big family outing, a week after Eli’s birth

January 2006: tofu with fried basil and onions, veggie spring rolls, pad thai and mussamun curry, take-out, to celebrate our first night home after a year-long renovation

4 May 2007: a poached egg with crème fraiche and snipped chive, served in its shell, balanced on a bed of crystal-clear salt, the 2nd in our 7-course “garden tasting menu” at Fifth Floor Restaurant, a perfect, decadent meal to celebrate ten years.

When Ben was a little bit, we participated in a “nurse-in,” breastfeeding with about 1,200 other moms, babies, and toddlers in a big Berkeley auditorium. Ben could hardly focus, so wide-eyed at the site of all those kids nursing at the same time, but he latched on long enough for us to help set a new world record.

I was happy to read recently that the record’s been broken yet again, this time in the Philippines.
Congratulations to all those moms and their kids!

One of the (many) reasons we renovated our house last year was because our little Edwardian, with all its chair rails and moldings, didn’t have much open wall space for Tony’s late father’s enormous paintings. Now, we’ve been able to hang several of the fabulous, gorgeous canvases… but as it turns out, Ben needs plenty of display space, too. He’s taken to taping his pictures (right now it’s all trains, all the time) to the half-wall over his art table, to doors, and now to the front window.
On the far right, you see an Amtrak train (“toot!!” it says,) its pantograph carefully connecting it to the electric wires above. The sign on the bottom says simply, “Ben Love Tony.” And this morning’s addition, after we’d baked banana coconut muffins, welcomed friends for a playdate: “Muffins Waiting.”

I’m so happy to live in this house!

(a note about the muffins: you can replace half the butter with 3/4 c ground flax seed and feel virtuous about eating two or three…)

For my honey, of course, on his birthday.
This is Nigella Lawson’s chocolate honey cake (scroll way down for the recipe), from the chocolate cake hall of fame in Feast. It’s moist and rich, you can mix it all in the food processor, and those little marzipan-almond wing bees are fun to make, like edible play-doh (Wait, says Eli, play-doh isn’t edible?). And they taste good, too.

Libby’s latest column is up at Literary Mama, and definitely worth a read. Here’s a taste:

The girl is entranced by books. One of the first places we see her is in a bookshop, where she slides a ladder around to find and borrow a book she can’t afford to buy, a book she wants to reread. The astonished proprietor (“but you’ve read it twice!”) gives her the book and she leaves, rereading the book as she walks, singing happily.

“Oh, isn’t this amazing/It’s my favorite part, because, you see/Here’s where she meets Prince Charming/But she won’t discover that it’s him, ’til Chapter Three!” She sits by a fountain and settles in to enjoy the book, sheep crowding her at every side, water falling behind her.

I’d never seen myself in a cartoon character before, but watching Belle on the big screen transported me back almost twenty years, to a summer of rereading. Staying at my grandparents’ house in Connecticut, we had only the books left behind by my mother and her sisters. Like the movie’s Belle, I carried my books outside. Grandpop had planted a Christmas tree grove and the trees formed lanes and little rooms, circles carpeted with pine needles and hidden by thick branches. I would carry a book into the cool shade of one of these pine chambers and read, inhaling the musty fragrance of old books along with the sap-infused air of the grove. Disney’s Belle brought that former self back to me, reminded me of who I’d been and who I hoped my daughter might become: an outside reader: taking books outdoors and unmooring their stories.

Read more at Literary Mama!

Today, in honor of MotherTalk’s Fearless Friday spotlight on Arianna Huffington’s new book, Becoming Fearless, I’m supposed to write about a fearless moment in my life, or a moment when I started becoming fearless.

First, here are some moments I remember feeling fear:
When I was five, and we’d just arrived in Connecticut from Japan and my unfamiliar uncle reached into the car to pick me up;
When I was twenty-two, and a guy with a finger in the pocket of his sweatshirt mugged me;
When I was thirty-five, and I was in an emergency room with my listless, feverish, 9 month-old baby being diagnosed with pneumonia.

Some more typically frightening things — leaving my public school and going to boarding school in 9th grade; moving across country at 22 with no job and no place to live (that one probably scared my parents, but they were remarkably calm!); giving birth — didn’t scare me at all, and I’m trying to work out the pattern, but I think mostly for me (as, I suspect, for many others) the things you choose are less scary than the things that are imposed or inflicted on you.

Just over a year ago, I started a blog. Before that, I’d been afraid of even commenting on a blog, worried, as we often are, of coming across as too stupid, too trivial, too ordinary. Well, maybe I am all of those things some of the time, but I’m also not any of those things enough of the time that I keep putting it out there. And in a direct line from blogging comes my column, and now a book, and a measure of fearlessness. I’ll write to anybody, anywhere, and ask them to talk to me.

So if you’re reading this blog and have never commented, celebrate Fearless Friday with me and drop me line.

These are just easy and good.

1/2 c butter (1 stick)
1 c water
1 c flour
5 eggs
1 c grated gruyere
1/2 c grated parmesan
2 t dijon mustard
fresh black pepper

Preheat oven to 425.
Heat butter and water in a medium saucepan over medium heat until butter is melted and mixture comes to a simmer.
Turn heat to low, add flour and stir until mixture starts to pull away from the sides of the pan (about a minute).
Remove pan from heat and add the eggs, one at a time, stirring well after each (dough will separate at first, but keep stirring and it will form a smooth paste).
Stir in remaining ingredients.
Drop mixture in heaping tablespoonfuls onto 2 greased or parchment-lined baking sheets. (At this point you can freeze them until you’re ready to bake).
Bake until puffed and brown, about 30 minutes. Cut slits in sides of puffs, return to oven and lower the heat to 350. Bake 10 minutes more.

I don’t know what makes me happier: the fact that my little vegetable garden now produces a nearly year-round supply of chard, or the fact that my boys say “Yay, chard!” and gobble it up for dinner.

It’s all very good.