Ben’s been reading cookbooks lately, really reading them, like bedtime stories. After our bedtime routine of two picture books and a chapter of (currently) A Cricket in Times Square, Ben reads aloud to Eli, who is very patient about being read to sleep with recipes for pesto and salad dressing (though I do sometimes wonder how this affects his dreams).

And because Ben’s a reading and writing kind of guy, it didn’t surprise me that reading cookbooks would lead him to write out recipes, but now he’s also starting to invent his own. He didn’t get very innovative with his recipes for guacamole or roasted potatoes (both of which he made for the extended family over Thanksgiving), but the other day he wrote out a recipe for bread that he’s been begging me to help him make.

I was torn. On the one hand, I want to encourage his kitchen adventures. On the other, it just didn’t look like a recipe that would turn out very well. I didn’t want him to be disappointed, and I didn’t want to waste food. So we sat down and compared his recipe to a similar one from his cookbook, we talked about the chemistry of baking, and we talked about not wasting food. He took it all in very seriously, but was ultimately not swayed. He wanted to bake his bread recipe, as written. So we did, and I’m happy to report, it turned out just fine — a nice, wheaty soda bread. So here’s the recipe, exactly as Ben wrote it, with my comments in brackets.

Whole-Wheat Bread

You’ll Need
¾ c + ½ c whole-wheat flour
½ c warm water
1/3 c cornmeal
1 package (1/4 ounce) dry yeast [not really doing anything in the recipe, so you could cut it]
3 tablespoons + ½ teaspoon granulated sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
2 tablespoons + ¼ teaspoons wheat germ
¼ teaspoon baking powder
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter [I talked Ben down from a full cup of butter, so we used 1/2 cup, melted]

Equipment
Measuring cups & spoons
Bread pan
Cooling rack

Preheat oven to 375 F.
Measure the flour, cornmeal & butter into the bread pan
Add the yeast and salt
Now add the water, sugar, baking soda & baking powder
Add the wheat germ
Bake up to ½ hour [it took exactly half an hour. This surprised me almost more than how good the bread tasted]

Note: This bread will taste good with some raspberry jam (page 77) [a reference to the jam recipe still to come in his hypothetical cookbook]

Edited to add: we ultimately halved the recipe (which delighted my fraction-loving boy) so a full recipe might need to bake longer than half an hour. Bake until the top is browned and a tester comes out clean.

We don’t watch a whole lot of television around here. The boys are still happily watching episodes of Oswald that we recorded two years ago, or the occasional Dan Zanes concert video. They even watch Sesame Street sometimes, old copies on videotape, even though apparently the lessons they teach are suspect. And while I’ve been Tivo-ing lots of programs that friends recommend, or that I’ve read intriguing reviews of (shows like Mad Men and Pushing Daisies), I haven’t actually watched any of them. These days we watch Project Runway and the occasional final quarter of a basketball game and then get back to work.

So, flying on JetBlue, as we do several times a year to visit my family, is always eye-opening. On our recent trip east, Ben watched a Discovery Channel program about bridge engineers, and Eli watched a lot of cooking shows.

I don’t have the attention span for a movie on a plane, and on this trip, once Eli fell asleep on my lap, I couldn’t keep the light on to read my fabulous book. So I flipped back and forth between the reality shows on Bravo and The Learning Channel, which is apparently, late at night, Multiples TV. First I watched a program about a family with quintuplets. And I was glad it wasn’t my family. Then I watched a program about a family of 10: 6 year-old twins and 2 year-old sextuplets. In one episode, the mom tried to get her grocery shopping done in under two hours while the sextuplets napped at home under a neighbor’s supervision. In the second, which I watched because the first was so gripping (I’m not being sarcastic) the parents, with help from an uncle, spend a Sunday afternoon installing garage shelving. Let me just tell you that if the television writers’ strike never ends, we’ll all be fine, because this was high drama.

I spent a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend surrounded by family, and enjoyed being with my parents, all my siblings and siblings-in-law, my niece, nephew and a pair of big dogs, but I sat on the plane watching these enormous families and gave thanks, again. My tiny grandmother used to say that it’s not a family until you have more kids than you can hold with both hands (she had four, despite being told that one pregnancy might kill her), but I’m content with my two, relieved that I don’t have to plan grocery store runs like military campaigns, and grateful that I don’t have to store six strollers in my garage.

Edited to add: I try to write the column without giving away anything about the plot for those of you who haven’t seen the film yet!

The guys and I traveled east for Thanksgiving, to my parents’ cozy Connecticut home deep in the woods. I spent the weekend surrounded by family and food — my favorite way to spend a few days. Occasionally my dad organized a work party to move a pile of wood; he cuts and splits the trees that fall in the woods, and we all work like a bucket brigade to move the logs from the woods to various spots on the rough-mowed lawn, and from there to the garage, so that my parents can heat their home all winter. The rest of the time, this time of year, we stay inside reading, writing, cooking, eating, talking talking talking.

So it’s a sharp contrast, indeed, to think about Into the Wild, the film I wrote about for Literary Mama this month. Its subject, Chris McCandless, decided to abandon civilization for a while and trek deep into the Alaskan back country. When I posted a draft of the column to the Literary Mama columnists’ group, it generated a great discussion about “guy” movies and “chick flicks,” and whether men are more likely to head into the wild than women. In my experience, among my friends and my own family, it’s the men who have stayed relatively close to their families and the women who, for various reasons, have moved away. I traveled from New York to California for grad school, met Tony, and never moved back. Hence my cross-country journey to visit my family.

It’s hard for me to imagine my boys ever having an independent life, let alone an independent life cut off from mine, but this movie made me think sadly about that. To distract myself from that line of thought, I focused on the sibling relationship, as depicted in the film and as I see it in my family. I hope that if my boys do ever choose to leave me, that at least they won’t leave each other.

Here’s a blurb from the column:

At home [months after Chris’s disappearance], his parents’ anger softens into pain and [his sister] wonders why he doesn’t get in touch with her; “the weight of Chris’s disappearance,” she says, “had begun to lay down on me full length.” Her words rocked me out of my Alaskan reverie to think about my own family. I’ve got two older brothers living 3,000 miles away. We may not talk every week or even every two, but I know that when I call, they’ll call back. We’ll connect. I thought about Carine McCandless and how I’d feel if one of my brothers just . . . left. Nothing on the surface of my life would look much different, but I’d walk with a persistent ache no doctor could ever heal.

And then my thoughts turned to my boys, young brothers who wriggle like puppies together in the oldest one’s bed each night. I thought about Eli, who from the time he could talk has called Ben “Buh-buh,” for “Brother Ben,” the sharp urgency in his voice now when he calls out “Ben!”, about how bereft he’d be if that call went unanswered one day. I thought about how Ben runs to give Eli a hug before we leave his kindergarten classroom each morning, and then bends down gently to give Eli a kiss on the cheek. I can’t bear to imagine them losing each other. To move into adulthood having lost the shared history and understanding created with a brother or sister would permanently cloud one’s days.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest, and let me know what you think.

To Grandmother’s (and Granddad’s) house we go!

And in honor of our current favorite travel game, here’s what we’re packing:

Animal and alphabet books
Blanket (Eli)
Clothing for three days (knowing we can do laundry partway through the trip)
DVD player to get through 10 hours on airplanes (plus who knows how long in airports…)
Eli’s two stuffed doggies
Fanny at Chez Panisse (Ben’s bedtime reading of choice)
Granola
Hats
i-phones? ice-cream? no, none of these I items
Jamberry (Eli)
Kipper
Laptops
Monkey (Ben)
New Yorkers from the last month (I’m being optimistic)
O‘s cereal
The Places In Between (Caroline’s book)
a sketch for a Quilt I’m thinking of commissioning from Susan’s mom
Robert McCloskey books
The Spirit of St. Louis (Tony’s book)
Tofu jerkey (Tony)
Unlined drawing paper for the boys
Very many stickers for Eli
Warm sweaters
2 oz bottles of toiletries that will make it through the X-ray screening
Yellow, and green and blue and red and black markers
Z-bars (the kid Cliff bars)

First, there was Stupid Tired. We’d been parents less than a week, and were driving the still-unfamiliar route to the pediatrician’s office for Ben’s first check-up when I said to Tony, “Shouldn’t you turn here?” And he responded, “Aren’t you driving?” (The irony of course is that now we could drive the route in our sleep.)

Then, there was Desperate Tired. The stand-out (although really, there’ve been so many times, it’s hard to keep track) was my first morning home after a trip with Ben to visit my sister in Virginia. Ben was about 8 months old. He hadn’t slept particularly in Virginia, and now on our first day back he woke for the day at 4:30 AM, Tony had gone in to work around 6:30, and by 9 I was lying on the living room floor, out of my head exhausted, crying pathetic tears and letting Ben crawl all over me.

Today didn’t start out seeming like a day when I’d realize a new level of Tired, but there were 4 clamorous kids (only one of them mine) in the house all morning and then a too-short nap from Eli. We followed-up the nap with some rough-housing on the big bed — at least I could be horizontal, right? We were baby cats, and then we were baby dogs. We did bouncing, and then we made a fort with the comforter. And then there was more bouncing. And maybe it was the oxygen-deprivation in the fort, but all of a sudden I realized I was… waking up with Eli jumping on me! Hmm. Don’t know how much time was lost.

Clearly (and I know not every exhausted mother would respond this way) it was time to do some baking, and Mayan Chocolate Cookies seemed like the right call. I tore the recipe out of the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago and hadn’t tried them till today. They’re worth making. Even when you’re not Espresso-Cookie Tired.

for the dough:
1 ½ c flour
1 ½ t baking powder
½ t salt
½ t cinnamon
1 t instant espresso powder
¼ t ground black pepper
1/8 t cayenne pepper
¾ c unsweetened cocoa
¾ c butter
¾ c sugar
1 egg
2 t vanilla

for the filling:
about ½ c chocolate chips
about ¼ c white sugar

Sift together dry ingredients.

Beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy; add egg and vanilla and beat well. Add dry ingredients and blend. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350.

Line a baking sheet with parchment. Put chocolate chips and sugar in separate bowls. Pinch off a walnut-sized piece of dough and press an indentation in the center; insert 4 chocolate chips and mold the dough around them to enclose completely. Roll the dough into a ball, roll the ball in the sugar, and place on baking sheet. Continue with remaining dough.

Bake for 8 minutes. Do not overbake; they’re best when still a little moist in the center.

• Two nights in his new big-boy bed
• Two trips to Ikea to visit the bed before we bought it
• Two critters, a dog and a cat, on the headboard of his new “kritter” bed
• Two two-word phrases that made us decide against bunk beds (“jungle gym” and “stomach flu”)
• Two trips to the bathroom each night after bedtime
• Two boys happy about having a roommate
• Two two A.M. cuddles since leaving the crib behind
• Two mornings with Eli walking down the hall to our room, announcing happily “Li awake! It sunny day!”

Here’s to a couple years of good sleeping in this new bed!

They say city squirrels and city raccoons are tougher and more feisty than ones in the country (though this is hard to imagine); I guess Eli thinks city butterflies are tougher than their country cousins, too. We were at the playground the other day, and he was making me delicious imaginary lattes in the playhouse structure. Lately when we play, he sets up imaginary doors and windows, and spends a lot of time showing me where they are, updating me on their status (“This one open, this one shut“), and pulling them open and closed.

So there we were, me sipping on my imaginary latte, wishing for a real one, murmuring interest in the ever-changing status of the cafe door, when Eli did a double-take: “Hey, no doorstop!”

Well, no, indeed, the imaginary door had no doorstop.

“Maybe,” he continued thoughtfully, “A butterfly came, ate the doorstop!”

And for the rest of the morning, whenever he spotted a butterfly, he pointed accusingly, “Maybe that one ate cafe doorstop.”

I hope this notion doesn’t color his idea of butterflies for too long. The city’s butterflies are pretty scrappy, but I don’t think they’ve been reduced to doorstop-eating yet.

We spent the weekend with old friends up in Stinson Beach, an October tradition for the past three years, so that we can take the kids to the Bolinas pumpkin patch. I was distracted all weekend by various kinds of work, but it didn’t stop me from indulging in one of my favorite beach activities: the outdoor shower. Our friends’ house has a very simple one, just a shower head behind a wooden half-wall, but with a view like this–see where the sky meets the sea?–you sure don’t need more.

I’ve been all about reading and editing lately, no new writing at all. But Tony’s been productive, launching a new website, James Grant. So go check that out, enjoy the gorgeous artwork, and have a great weekend!

Elrena tagged me for this on a day that I had gone to the grocery store for celery and seaweed, and that just didn’t seem like quite enough to blog about! (We used the celery for Tony’s puttanesca recipe, by the way, and the seaweed for sushi).

Now it’s been over a week and it took till today to get back to the grocery store which demonstrates a) how successful I’ve been in getting Tony to take over the grocery shopping; b) how little in-person shopping of any kind that I do. I do as much shopping as possible on-line, even though that has tended to limit me to big chain stores; I’m trying to search out more places like this fabulous site, Etsy, which lets you buy handmade objects from individual people (nothing here I particularly need right now, but it’s all awfully pretty).

In the meantime, things have been purchased, of course; the weekly produce delivery has come a couple times, and I ordered Ben a tux for his Halloween magician’s costume (yeah, a tux is probably overkill, but for $15 on e-bay, who can resist?) But no shopping trip worth a blog post, which does makes me think that, much as I like a pretty new lipstick like the next girl, maybe I could consider joining The Compact and go without anything new for a year (yes, they make certain exceptions for kids needs, and for food and medicines); I mean, if I could still go to Crossroads occasionally for a new-to-me shirt, I think I’d be good. And given how infrequently I remember to wear lipstick, I could probably make it through the year without a new one…

Anyway, I did finally go to a store today, with Eli, and even though we didn’t buy very much, it is perhaps a blog-worthy experience. You be the judge.

Here are the rules for the meme:
Pick a recent shopping trip — for clothes, shoes, groceries, doesn’t matter. The only guideline is that it will be easier to play if you purchased at least a few things.

Now tell us, about your purchases:

1. What are you proud of?
2. What are you embarrassed by?
3. What do think you couldn’t live without?
4. What did you most enjoy purchasing?
5. What were you most tempted by? (This last one may or may not be an actual purchase!)

So, we went to the grocery store, a small, family-owned chain in the neighborhood, and bought a gallon of 2% milk (for the boys), a half gallon of skim milk (for me), a bottle of soy sauce, a big container of non-fat plain yogurt, and two bottles of dishwasher rinse aid.

1. I am, oddly, proudest of the rinse-aid. I have hated to buy the stuff, it seems like a ploy concocted by the dishwasher manufacturers and chemical companies to make you buy more junk that just goes down the drain, and it has seemed fairly poisonous. But the dishwasher works a lot better when we use it, so what to do? Today, I finally found a “greener,” biodegradable version of the stuff. And it’s cheaper than the regular kind. So, yay.

2. I’m not embarrassed by anything I bought, but I am annoyed that I forgot to bring canvas shopping bags. We have half a dozen, and I need to start keeping them in the car, especially now that San Francisco is, in an effort to reduce the use of plastic grocery bags, charging for their use. I used paper today, and got the canvas bags out of the closet — one step closer to the car.

3. We couldn’t live without the milk. The boys and I eat cereal every morning for breakfast, Eli drinks 2 glasses of milk a day, Tony makes a cappuccino or two every day, I put milk in my tea. We have become the kind of family that always needs a gallon of milk. We’ve got several brands of organic milk to choose from, all of it local, too.

4. Nothing terribly exciting on this grocery list, but I think I most enjoyed purchasing the rinse-aid (I know, I know), partly because of #1, partly because it was the one thing light and durable enough that Eli could take it off the shelf and fling it into the cart. Watching him enjoy that so much made me buy two bottles.

5. Well, we were tempted by a few things. Eli, oddly, was most tempted by the Silicone-Zone Bar Board Set, four colorful anti-skid cutting boards for your cocktail set-up. We don’t really drink cocktails around here, though maybe Eli’s trying to tell me we should! On the other hand, I was most tempted, as I always am, by the pretty, robins egg blue Nigella Lawson mixing bowls. But I have three sets of mixing bowls, including a really lovely ceramic set Tony gave me, so I just admired these and moved on. We were both tempted by ice cream: “Mama, look! ah-keem! and more ah-keem! lot ah-keem!” said Eli. Mmmm, ice-cream. But I know we have a gallon in the freezer, so we moved on.

And now for the tagging: Libby, Violeta, Momifesto, LoveBug and RolleyPolley, Fertile Ground, and anyone else who needs a kickstart to a blog post!