Vesna's Fun World

Who can talk?

2011-08-02T22:04:00.000-05:00

"Animals: they don't talk. Bugs: they don't talk. Insects: they don't talk," Ulysses pronounced between spoonfuls of blueberry yogurt.

"What about fish?" I asked.

"Oh," he answered sternly. "Fish are animals. So I didn't have to say that."

"What about birds? They're animals, I guess," I said, thinking I'd be chastised again for even mentioning them.

"Birds? They can still sing. And whales sing low."

"Yes, that's true."

"Killer whales are evil whales," he added.

A few moments later: "Sometimes aliens come to earth. And dinosaurs" -- he raised his arms above his head -- "They're these gigankik animals."

"Do they talk?"

"Mm-mm,"he responded in the negative.

"What about aliens?"

"Yes. They're animals from out of space. But they can talk. They talk like they're broken. They talk like breakdancers. There are lots of different aliens. Aliens can be good or evil. Aliens can have a plasma gun, only. An alien's favorite rocket ship is a flying saucer. Aliens can be brave."

"When they talk, what do they say?"

"I don't know. Aliens are only in out of space."

Inside the Capitol on a somber Thursday morning

2011-03-10T14:43:00.001-06:00

War on Wisconsin

2011-03-03T22:40:00.000-06:00

When I brought Ulysses home from the bus stop after school today, Donald was watching the Ed Show. The topic was the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill: how it would devastates not just Wisconsin workers, but many Wisconsin institutions as well -- the University, the primary schools and more.

The caption along the bottom of the screen read "War on Wisconsin," with an outline of the map of the state.

"War on Wisconsin," Ulysses read. "War on Wisconsin! Hey! That says 'War on Wisconsin!'"

We haven't been talking to him about what's going on with the protests, the attack on teachers' jobs, the attack on unions, the protests at the Capitol and throughout the state. When school was out for a week due to the teach-outs, he decided it was another "Winter break."

Now he looked at the screen, concerned.

"War on Wisconsin," he repeated. "The good guys gotta save Wisconsin."

"That's right," we said.

"They've gotta fight to save the Capitol!"

Maybe I should take him down to the demonstrations after all. I think he would understand better than I thought.

Wisconsin demonstration to protect workers' rights

2011-02-27T22:04:00.001-06:00

I marched with the James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation and other UUs in this part of Wisconsin as part of what might be the largest demonstration in Wisconsin history.

Please click on the picture above for a better view of the photos and videos in this slideshow, and to read the full captions.

Estimates are 100,000 outdoors and another 4000 inside the Capitol building.

It was a strange combination: such a peaceful environment, yet so much anger being expressed. Good feelings, yet with an intensely somber, sober purpose.

The newly elected governor of the state has set to the task of dismantling the middle class in Wisconsin. The tactic is to pit people against one another. Divide and conquer. Yet a broad range of people come together in this common purpose.

A Short Story

2011-01-05T20:29:00.002-06:00

Ulysses, at bedtime, offered this bedtime story:

"Once upon a time, the kid was already asleep in the mom's arms. The end."

He paused.

"That's a short story."

Dessert

2010-12-11T10:55:00.000-06:00

“Pizza is so good!” Ulysses said.

He elaborated:

“Pizza is good because you can have it for dinner, or lunch, or snack.

“Or even for dessert – like spinach.”

Ulysses' Nutrition Facts

2010-10-16T09:36:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

U: Nutrition is eating good food. Like vegetables. That's nutrition. Good guys like to eat good food.

V: So what do bad guys eat?

U: Oh! Bad guys don't want good people to eat good food.

V: What do they want them to eat?

U: Bad guys just want everyone to eat fructose.

Ulysses' Science Facts: The octopus

2010-10-13T09:03:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

U: Do you know what an octopus is? An octopus is an animal with a whole lot of legs. Lots and lots of legs.

V: How many?

U: Oh! Thousands and thousands of legs.

V: I thought they just had eight.

U: Eight? No! They have a lot more than that.
Thousands. Do you know what an octopus eats?

V: What?

U: An octopus eats birds. And do you know why an octopus eats birds?

V: Why?

U: Because they're soooo delicious! It goes up into the air and gets the bird and eats it.

V: Do octopuses fly?

U: Octopuses? Of course not.

String Theory and Theology

2010-10-03T19:50:00.001-05:00

Cover via Amazon

Today I was a worship associate for a service at the James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation for the second time. The topic was "String Theory and Theology."

I researched and read all I could over the course of about a week and a half. Several days in, I realized I wasn't going to understand string theory well enough to write anything about it in time to make a presentation by the end of the week! So I decided to do readings instead.

The book I studied most was Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku. Donald and I bought a book of his called Hyperspace in the early 1990s when we belonged, briefly, to the Book of the Month Club. We never read it. It looked really cool. We were too intimated by it, I guess, to ever actually crack it and start reading. From what I could see of Parallel Worlds, published in 2005, it seemed to update a lot of stuff from Hyperspace. So I figured that I owed it to the guy to at least read one of his books, considering that I had waited so long on the other one that it might already be obsolete!

Chalice lighting

Image via WikipediaOur opening words come from the physicist and cosmologist George Gamow, born in 1904 in Odessa, Russia, who attempted to escape the Soviet Union by sailing to Turkey on a raft and went on to become one of the originators of the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, which he heroically defended against ridicule for years before it became generally accepted.

Gamow wrote this poem:

There was a young fellow from Trinity

Who took the square root of infinity

But the number of digits

Gave him the fidgets;

He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

Pastoral Thought: "Cosmic Music"

Image via WikipediaThe reading is excerpted, abridged and somewhat rearranged from Parallel Worlds: A Journey through creation, higher dimensions and the future of the cosmos, by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.

The link between music and science was forged as early as the fifth century B.C., when the Greek Pythagoreans discovered the laws of harmony and reduced them to mathematics. They found that the tone of a plucked lyre string corresponded to its length. If one doubled the length of the string, the note went down one octave. If the length of a string was reduced by two-thirds, the tone went up a fifth. Hence the laws of music and harmony could be reduced to precise relations between numbers. “All things are numbers,” they said.

They dared to apply these laws of harmony to the entire universe. They failed because of the enormous complexity of matter.

In some sense, with string theory, physicists are going back to the Pythagorean dream.

According to string theory, if you had a supermicroscope and could peer into the heart of an electron, you would see not a point particle but a vibrating string. If we were to pluck this string, the vibration would change; the electron might turn into a neutrino. Pluck it again and it might turn into a quark. In fact, if you plucked it hard enough, it could turn into any of the known sub-atomic particles.

On a violin string, we can generate all the notes of the musical scale. B flat is not more fundamental than G. In the same way, electrons and quarks are not fundamental – the string is. All the subparticles of the universe can be viewed as nothing but different vibrations of the string.

The “harmonies” of the string are the laws of physics.

The lowest vibration of the string can be interpreted as the graviton, the point particle of gravity.

As the string moves and breaks and reforms, we find Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

If Einstein had never discovered relativity, it might have been discovered as a by-product of string theory.

Music provides the metaphor for the nature of the universe, both at the subatomic level and at the cosmic level.

Einstein said his search for a unified field theory would ultimately allow him to “read the Mind of God.” If string theory is correct, we now see that the Mind of God represents cosmic music resonating through ten-dimensional hyperspace.

Closing words

Our closing words are from the philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned to death 1600 for refusing to renounce views such as this.

“Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.”

Enough, already!

2010-09-19T17:00:00.005-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

I gave this talk at James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation as the Pastoral Thought for the worship service titled "Spiritual Harvests: Accepting your highest good." Maison Cruz was the lead presenter. Bryan Verstegen provided music.

Good morning, good morning, good morning!

(Quieting response from congregation) Alright, that’s enough.

(Sternly) I said that’s enough.

(Hands on hips) I’ve had just about enough.

(Nonchalantly) Well! That’s enough of that!

“Enough”: I thought that was a good thing.

In fact, I’ve heard it said that you can’t have too much of a good thing.

It should follow, logically, that “enough” can’t ever be a bad thing.

So how much is enough? Is “enough” a “how much”? Is it an amount at all?

Or is it a state of mind?

I know I don’t make enough money. I think. But what does that mean?

I have enough to eat. I have a place to live. Heat in the winter. Clean water. Shoes. I have a little boy. And that means I have enough to worry about. But I’ve never worried that maybe he might starve.

But I don’t have enough to buy a house. Or visit Spain. Or even my own hometown.

So naturally it seems to me that I’d be happier if had more. It’s like, I have enough. But I don’t have enough.

But enough still is better than not enough. That’s simple enough.

Or is it?

Image via Wikipedia

I want to share an excerpt from the current UUA World magazine. You probably have it at home – you might have looked at it enough times, saying you ought to read it – but you might not have had enough chance to read it. This is from a speech given by Keith Ellison at this summer’s UUA General Assembly. Ellison is a U.S. Representative from Minnesota. The speech is titled “There Is Enough.”
Conveniently for me.

Ellison gives his take of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes:

[The disciples] looked at each other, and they looked at him and said, that’s not enough to feed all of these people. It’s not enough. They’ve got to go home. We can’t help them out…

And Jesus, he didn’t argue with them. He just started handing out food, and as the scripture goes, there was enough. There was enough … [T]he scripture says that after the meal, there was not just enough. There was more than enough, and they had to pick up what was left over.

Then Ellison suggests some ideas for what might have actually happened. He says he doesn’t know, but he seems to favor this one:

[M]aybe what happened is that the disciples’ perception of scarcity was misinformed and actually there was more than they understood there to be. Maybe there was abundance. Maybe there was radical abundance, though they saw scarcity.

Like the villiagers in the telling of “Stone Soup” we just heard, Ellison thinks maybe the disciples were looking at something that was actually enough, but their fear, their scarcity consciousness made them see it as not enough.

He goes on to make his larger point:

And you know, today, there’s enough. There’s enough for you and for me. There’s enough for the straight and the gay. …. We don’t have to throw anybody under the bus. We don’t have to chase anybody out the door...

There’s enough. Right? But you know what? There may not be enough if we continue to spend more than any other nation on the military. …

There may not be enough if there’s greed, if there’s hoarding. There may not be enough if we take the bountiful oceans that we’ve been blessed with and we pollute them with fossil fuels that spill into our oceans. …

You know there may not be enough if we squander and waste what we have. There may not be enough if we devote all of our resources to war-making and killing and destruction. But there is enough, brothers and sisters, if we will embrace love….

Ellison’s assumption here is that “enough” is a good thing. We need to realize that we have enough, we have plenty, and not squander it and destroy it, because then we would have “not enough,” and “not enough” is a bad thing. That’s the assumption this reasoning is based on. That “enough” is a good thing.

But I wonder. Whether having enough might actually be the problem. A problem that it is very, very difficult for the human animal to overcome.

Image via WikipediaIn his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” author Jared Diamond describes how inequity has come about in human societies. And how it has come to be the dominant pattern on earth.

It seems that whenever, wherever there’s not quite enough, people figure out how to share. How to get by. How to get along. But wherever there’s plenty – wherever there’s enough – there’s poverty. It’s a tragic paradox, but it tracks around the globe and through history.

For instance, wherever grain is cultivated – the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, South America, the places where food production was independently developed – chieftains arise, and then kings. Right away, society splits into strata. Hierarchies.

Why? Why kings and grain? Why does grain mean kings?

It’s food that lasts long enough to store. It’s food that you can grow enough of to store. Stored in places. Places that can be controlled.

Now, right away, there are people with more, and people with less.

There’s so much food that not everyone has to spend their days hunting it and gathering it. Now some people can devote themselves to other things: and now there can be artisans. Stonemasons. Smiths. Scribes. Priests. Soldiers.

Soldiers who can go out and get more territory to grow more food, and bring back slaves from those places. Slaves that can do the menial tasks that by now there’s technology to do. Like, slaves can build temples to communicate the message about following the king and listening to the priests to fulfill your role in producing the food – and by now all the other technologies – that make the society run that controls the flow and distribution of food. And all the other stuff. Stuff that you now need to live in that society.

In this book, Diamond describes the Polynesian Islands, thouands of islands in the Pacific, with all different climates and conditions – how the toughest islands to live on were the most egalitarian, with sophisticated systems for conflict resolution.

In the subarctic Chatham Islands, for instance, the soil wasn’t rich enough for farming, so the Polynesian settlers had to revert to hunting and gathering. There was never quite enough for the population to grow, so they learned to keep one another going. They couldn’t kill each other; there weren’t enough people to spare. They had to learn to get along.

While in Hawaii, the soil was rich enough and there were enough inland streams for irrigation and the sun was warm enough to grow plenty of crops. There was building stone for sturdy dwellings and aquaculture to farm enough fish for plenty of protein. A tropical island paradise, right? Enough of everything! Plenty!

But here was despotism. Empire. Incessant and ferocious war. All this plenty was only for the kings and the ruling classes and the priests. Rations and bloodshed for everybody else.

In America’s Great Depression, when so many people didn’t have enough, in reality there was plenty. Plenty of wheat. Plenty of coal. Plenty of money! And you can’t have too much of a good thing, right? Unless it’s not where it needs to be.

And it seems that when we humans have enough, or more than enough, somebody gets control of it, and those people just won’t let it go, voluntarily.

I guess because they feel like if they do, they just won’t have enough.

Which brings us back to “enough” being a state of mind.

Today our corporate executives with multimillion dollar golden parachutes clearly don’t feel that a few hundred thousand dollars a year is enough. They need their income in the millions. But for them to have that, everybody else needs to have less. Less pay, less insurance, less time off. All those ridiculous expenses, those unreasonable perks, that are forcing them to place jobs overseas where people are happy – desperate! – to see them come, because they don’t demand so much. People who have a lower expectation of “enough.”

What does it all mean? What does it all add up to?

I would go on.

(Looks at watch) But I don’t have enough time.

Thank you.

Working hard at EVP

2010-06-30T11:30:00.001-05:00

Sigurd and I ran into one another at EVP coffeehouse. I had gone there to get some work done while Ulysses was at his enrichment summer classes at nearby Hamilton Middle School, Nico's alma mater. Sigurd had gone to get some math work done in peace and quiet away from home the last chance he had before getting ready to travel with the family this weekend to The Netherlands and Spain for the summer.

As you can see from this picture, we both got lots of work done and did not let chatting and catching up become a distraction.

A light snack

2010-05-13T08:43:00.000-05:00

As Donald was passing by, Ulysses snatched up the flashlight, switched it on, and proceeded to make a great show of pretending to devour it: "Nyam, naym, nyam!"

"Ulysses, what are you doing!" Donald cried. "Why are you eating a flashlight?"

"I wanted a light snack!" came the reply.

Donald stopped short, then looked at me suspiciously. "Did you teach him that?"

I nodded, beaming. (Hey! I was beaming! Get it?)

Donald paused, and shook his head. "I'm calling Social Services."

Forward!

2010-04-28T08:38:00.000-05:00

"My backup is 14% done so far," I announced to Don. "24 gigabytes."

Ulysses looked over my shoulder at the progress bar of the Carbonite backup I've been running for the past week.

"See? I'm backing up my computer. That's how far I've gotten. I have all this way to go."

"You're backing up?" he said, sounding alarmed.

"That's right."

"No! Don't back up! Never back up. Always go forward!"

.

Plus, it's the only one with avocados

2010-03-17T06:39:00.005-05:00

"Earth is my favorite planet," Ulysses announced.

"What do you like about best about it?" I asked.

I try not to ask why anyone likes what they like. I try instead to invite them to tell me about what they like.

Years ago, in California, I learned that asking "Why do you like x?" can put people on the defensive and shut them down. "Why do you like avocado ice cream?" is really sort of aggressive -- it puts a person in the position of defending the fact that they like what they like. Hence responses along the lines of, "Because I do."

Instead of asking "why," then, we might ask "what." "What do you like best about avocado ice cream?" is more likely to help a person feel more comfortable about sharing. And it's more likely to trigger specifics to come to mind.

In my own thought experiment as I write this, my internal response to "Why do you like avocado ice cream?" was "I just like it. It's good." And I felt a little silly for liking avocado ice cream as I thought it. When I asked myself "What do you like about avocado ice cream?" my answer came as "It's rich and creamy and tasty."

Then I asked myself "What do you like best about avocado ice cream?" Interestingly, this question had the most comfortable feel of all. Somehow it triggered the most specific details immediately. I thought, "Such a pretty shade of deep green. Such a velvety mouthfeel. Such a luscious, silky, aroma. Such a delicate flavor." I could see and feel the scoop digging into the tub. Also I like it that the flavor of avocado goes so nicely with sweet. I never would have thought it!

Back to Earth.

Ulysses answered, without hesitation, "It has green grass and blue water."

Star Wars AT-AT Walker birthday cake

2010-02-16T06:50:00.002-06:00

For weeks, Ulysses has been describing the cake he wanted for his sixth birthday party: a "Giant Robot Cake." All good Star Wars geeks will recognize this as an AT-AT Walker as seen in the Battle of Hoth, in the early scenes of The Empire Strikes Back.

After some slices were taken out, the head adopted a more lifelike angle!

The luscious cake interior. I assure you, no mixes were involved. Everything is completely from scratch.

I have to run to U's kindergarten party now to deliver 24 Storm Trooper cupcakes. I promise more details in this very post ASAP!

Never to eat dirt again

2010-02-08T06:18:00.004-06:00

We got a new vacuum cleaner. I never thought I'd want to look at dirt, but it seems the clear-canister models with "cyclone" action are the future. Target had only a few bagged models. We could see the writing on the retail display wall: vac bags are are going the way of the floppy disk. Heck if I'm going to fingernail-cling to the past when it comes to least-favorite-chore appliances. Make way for the future!

Donald left our 20th-century green Dirt Devil out for Ulysses to see when he got home from school. Why not just throw it out? U might be sad. You never know where the sentimental attachments lie. We might need to engineer a transition. It's better to be safe when it comes to the emotions of a 5-year-old.

"A new vacuum cleaner!" he said at the sight of the bright yellow machine, compact and serene on the newly crumb-free living room carpet. "It's soooo cute!" I noticed he wasn't calling it a "mess robot," and marked, with an inner sigh, the demise of another little-kidism. "This one is for me!" he went on. "This is my vacuum cleaner!"

He spotted the old green one, which suddenly appeared hulking and clumsy next to the sporty new Eureka, with its ring handle and gleaming dilithium dirt chamber. "Now we have two vacuum cleaners," he said.

"That one's broken," said Donald carefully.

"We're throwing that one out," I said.

Ulysses regarded it. "It got old," he pronounced. "Poor old vacuum cleaner. It'll never eat dirt again."

Cellular Peptide Cake -- with Mint Frosting

2010-02-01T06:19:00.009-06:00

Data: "What kind of cake is that?"

Worf: "It is a cellular peptide cake. With mmmint frosting."

This exchange takes place in Act 1 of Phantasms (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 7). Data has discovered that, although he's an android, he can dream. In Phantasms he discovers how disturbing dreams can be, when he wanders into Ten-Forward and finds Counselor Troi as a giant cake with a slice taken out of her, no less.

No worries, Troi assures Data in the closing scene: "Sometimes a cake is just a cake." She presents him with a cake in the shape of Data.

Ethan Phillips's, in The Star Trek Cookbook, provides a sponge cake recipe for you to make your own cellular peptide cake. However, his is made with 10, count 'em, 10 yolks. No whites. First of all, this will yield a deep yellow cake with a relatively dense crumb, not like the ethereally pale and loosely bubbled cake Mr. Worf is forking in. Second: 10 yolks! Not when I'm paying four bucks a dozen for fantastic, farm-direct, organic eggs. And what am I going to do with 10 whites, eat egg white omelettes? Make angel food cakes? Say, what is it about angel food cake that gives it that bone-white paleness and exceedingly open crumb? Hmm, could it be ... egg whites?

The sponge cake found in Mark Bittman's sweeping How to Cook Everything is made with an equal measure of yolks and whites. It gave me just the right spongey consistency. Because I made a half recipe, using small 6" cake pans, and because the Keene Organic's eggs are so big, I only needed to use two. (I weighed them out to find two Keene eggs that equalled three standard large ones.) A very simple recipe. Basically, beat yolks and whites separately with a little sugar, fold them together and stir in flour and a pinch of salt. It was really delicious, not least because those eggs are SO good. "You made this with a sponge!" Ulysses proclaimed.

The Star Trek Cookbook's frosting is chocolate mint, which makes no sense to me at all, because the only color you can make it after adding cocoa powder is going to be -- brown. Besides, did you hear Mr. Worf say, "Chocolate mint frosting?" Of course not. I got mine Starfleet-uniform blue by using Wilton's Sky Blue color and adding just enough No-Taste Red to shift the hue just right. I used my favorite buttercream recipe, which is from the C&H powdered sugar bag (1 pound sugar, 2/3 stick of butter, 1/4 cup milk, 1/8 teaspoon salt), plus a little cream and glycerin to get it really creamy and really smooth. Plus about 3/4 teaspoon mint extract which in retrospect was probably three tmes more than was needed.

I traced the insignia from the Star Fleet Technical Manual. Don't you have one?

I used the tracing paper stencil to outline with black royal icing, and then filled white buttercream using a star tip, appropriately enough. I sprinkled gold and silver shimmer dust, also by Wilton. over the white. Sparkly!

Purists will note that the angular bar behind the insignia is closer to the design of a comm badge circa 2370, as in the STNG movies, while Counselor Troi wore a badge with an oval shape behind the arrowhead at the time of Phantasms, which takes place in the 2360s. So sue me.

Your brain on dreams

2010-01-31T07:18:00.003-06:00

The Disney Channel's perky PSA showed an assortment of animals and people deep in slumber. The energetic voiceover: "Sleep is how your body rests!" followed by an exhortation to get proper rest.

I was folding clothes nearby when this caught my attention. "Hm," I thought out loud, "I would have said, 'Sleep is how your brain rests.'" I was about to go on that it's perfectly possible to lie down and rest your body without being asleep; that the change in brain state is what makes the difference between sleep and wakefulness.

"No!" said Ulysses, forcefully. "Sleep is how your body rests."

"Sleep is how your brain rests," I repeated, "because your brain waves..."

Ulysses cut me off. "Sleep is how your body rests."

"Sleep is how your brain rests," I said, unhelpfully.

"Sleep is how your body rests."

"Sleep is how your brain rests."

"Sleep is how your body rests."

"OK, OK, whatever," I said.

* * *

At bedtime, I tucked Ulysses in and said, "Now it's sleep time. Shut your eyes and go to sleep."

"Sleep is how your body rests," he reminded me.

"Sleep is how your brain rests," I said.

"No! Your brain has to stay awake."

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

"Your brain has to stay awake, so it can dream."

He kinda had me there.

Too far gone

2010-01-26T11:49:00.002-06:00

Ulysses was watching a kid show this morning before kindergarten. The main character, Special Agent Oso ("the unique stuffed bear" who helps children break down daunting tasks into manageable procedures via the scientific method) was assisting a little girl with her homework assignment, finding three wildflowers to press in a book.

The girl needed to find a daisy -- described in the show as a flower with white petals and a yellow center. She and Oso found themselves amidst a field of yellow-petaled flowers with white centers, white-petaled flowers with black centers and so forth. At each new flower discovery, Oso addressed the television viewing audience:

"Are these the daisies we're looking for?"

After the third iteration of this, Ulysses burst out:

"These aren't the droids we're looking for!"

He's way gone.

So safe

2010-01-26T06:18:00.010-06:00

"Good guys save the world," Ulysses said.

I looked up from the bamboo cutting board where I was using my favorite carbon-steel knife to dice fine an onion for the mountain of paprikash I was preparing for supper. Inches away, several pounds of chicken crackled vehemently against the intense heat of the flat, shallow sauteuse and of one of our biggest skillets. To save time, I had filled up multiple pans for the pre-browning. The over-the-stove vent was turned on, and it pulled lustily, if not all that effectively, at the fine oil mist that escaped up through the mesh of the spatter guards covering the pans.

"What's that?" I asked.

Ulysses was only a few yards from me, but on the other side of the noisy vortex of Maillard, and so not easy to hear. He was at the play table, a sturdy 6'-square cedar job Donald built him years ago, playing with his medieval knights, which he'd long ago divided into good guys and bad. His two castles -- one good and one bad, as he had instantly and irrevocably deemed each one as it came into the household -- were locked in combat. Cannon from the good guy side pummeled the bad castle, and when the bad guys tumbled from their crenolated turrets, U piled them up and slammed them away into their own dungeons.

"Good guys save the world." That was what I thought he'd said.

I took a breath.

"That's the idea," I said, finally.

"The world is so safe!" he exclaimed. "So safe."

To this I could not muster a response.

Goodbye, chompsticks

2010-01-25T10:08:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, we had spaghetti (low-carb from Dreamfields, the best!) and meatballs for breakfast. Fabulous red sauce, Newman's Organic marinara bolstered with caramelized onions and multicolored peppers. Last week I turned several pounds of on-sale ground chuck into many quart sacks of meatballs and froze 'em. Grated Romano. A satisfying start to a Sunday.

Ulysses joined us at table, new but catching on with him. He didn't want the red sauce, but was happy for me to squeeze some Annie's organic ketchup (the best!) over his pasta, along with plenty of romano. He even was thrilled to have meatballs in his bowl, although he did not deign to eat one.

His utensil of choice: chopsticks. He asked for them by name, but for the first time really called them "chopsticks." Up until now, he's always said "chompsticks." A great name for them, I've always thought, and plenty more descriptive than the real one!

No more "chompsticks," I guess; once he switches over to the regular word, there's never any going back to the cute-kid version. Thus our "cooking room" now is just a kitchen. We no longer hear of "PP3O" and "R2D-toon" as the names of that loveable pair of Star Wars droids.

At least Admiral Ackbar, he of The Return of the Jedi, is still, in Ulysses's words, "Eggroll Ackbar."

Just a tree

2010-01-24T06:43:00.010-06:00

"Put the ornaments in storage so our birthdays can come," Ulysses said.

Last night I finally dived into the daunting project of separating out all the little toys and wrapping bits that had gotten mixed up with the Christmas village and HO gauge (get it?) train set under the tree, putting away the holiday glassware and replacing it with the everyday mugs, taking down the cards -- and that reminds me, I still haven't made a holiday e-card to send friends and family.

U had protested whenever the subject of putting the Xmas stuff away came up. It wasn't really much of a conflict, because I was nowhere near actually doing it -- always something pressing to take care of, no good time window for it -- until last night, anyway. Meantime, plenty of good toys from Santa were going unplayed with, as the tree and the expanding unorganizable pile around it took up valuable play space.

Donald and I pointed out that, with the tree up, there was no space to celebrate the household birthdays coming up, mine in a week and U's in mid-Feb.

As I picked and packed, I was reassured to hear U encouraging me. Good, he got the message about making space for the next life event. Then:

"Just leave the Christmas tree up. That way it's still Christmas."

Well, maybe it's a gradual letting go.

* * *

The evening progressed without incident, if you don't count having your head and back made into a human slide for Backyardigans figurines several times over as an incident. Ulysses was proud to figure out how to open the complicated train storage box "all by myself," with only minor breakage of the styrofoam inner casing -- "Oops," said U -- fixable with a tape gun.

No complaints as the ornaments came down and got put away in the little individual plastic cups of their original packaging.

"That box is still missing an ornament," U pointed out.

"That was the ornament that broke the day we put the tree up, when you crawled behind the tree to follow the train and the tree fell over and everything came off," I reminded, matter-of-factly.

"Oh, right," he said. "And then we fixed it?" he added, apparently hoping against hope.

"No, it was one of those things that can't be fixed. It got smashed to smithereens."

"Smithereens, right!" he said. It's one of his favorite words.

Knickknacks and garlands, the set of 12 figurines representing historical Santas around the world, the matching poinsettia apron and tablecloth from Donald's grandmother, the pair of wooden camels from a 2008 yard sale, all disappeared into boxes.

"Don't forget the lights," said Ulysses. They were the only thing left on the tree, and I disentagled them from the branches. As I stuffed them into their box, I noticed it was printed with a copyright date of 2003. That meant we had got them for the Christmas I was carrying Ulysses, just before he was born.

Ulysses looked up at the tree. "Now it's a tree," he said. "It was a Christmas tree. Now it's just a tree."

He was smiling.

My big man

2010-01-20T20:21:00.003-06:00

Our neighbor, Jayne, dropped over today.

"How are you doing, Ulysses?" she inquired.

"Doing good," he answered.

"Do you like school?"

"Yes! I have fun."

"And your birthday is coming, too, isn't it. What are you going to be?"

I expected to hear "Six."

Instead, he said, "I'm going to be a big man!"

Ends with a "k"

2010-01-19T13:21:00.004-06:00

Yesterday Ulysses had off from kindergarten for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday. A day off for him means a day on for us, of course, but I'm always glad to be around him.

Last night I asked him, "Are you looking forward to going back to school tomorrow?"

"Mm-hmm," he hummed with enthusiasm. "It's fantaskick!"

"Fantaskick?" I said.

"Yes!" he replied. "Fantaskick ends with the letter 'k'!"

Princess Leia: Where's the crown?

2010-01-13T06:42:00.010-06:00

For over a year, one of U's favorite video games has been Lego Star Wars II: The Original Adventures. This is, of course, the interactive-play retelling of the original movies (the ones I think of as "the real ones") starting with the 1977 release that Changed Everything. His favorite character: Princess Leia.

"Princess Leia is a princess," Ulysses observed many times last summer. "But Princess Leia doesn't have a crown."

By gum, he's right. How did I never notice that?

"She's sooo beautiful!" he says, and has been saying frequently for several months now. Remember, he's not talking about Carrie Fisher, the human. He's talking about the cartoon video game character based on the blocky Lego toy based on an idealized, simplified construct of a fictional inhabitant of a fantasy universe last played by a flesh-and-blood actor over a quarter of a century ago.

He's seen the three 1970s-1980s movies several times, but he always goes back to the Playstation II as the lodestone. I'm pretty sure he thinks they're some sort of live-action adaption of the game. A novelty, perhaps.

So I always have to wonder when he says, with some heat, "Princess Leia is so beautiful!"

Meanwhile.

In kindergarten, his class has been learning about rhyming words. I was impressed when I heard Ulysses singing this song, to the tune of "The Wheels On the Bus": "Mouse and house are rhyming words, rhyming words, rhyming words. Mouse and house are rhyming words; they sound a lot of like." (I'm assuming the teacher sang "alike," but I'm not going to correct him; those cute little-kid linguistic quirks will be gone forever soon enough.) "Wall and ball are rhyming words..."; "Cat and hat are rhyming words..."

Wow! I thought, he understands what rhyming words are! I tried to introduce him to the concept a few months ago, but had gotten nowhere. Great, he's got it, I thought.

Until.

"Princess Leia and Amidala are rhyming words, rhyming words, rhyming words. Princess Leia and Amidala are rhyming words; they sound a lot of like."

The old switcheroo

2010-01-09T14:54:00.012-06:00

"Why can't we have a sticker on our car?"

Ulysses eyed the shiny row of well-scrubbed clunkers, lemons and rust buckets facing the highway as we drove by. Each sported a garish set of four digits in the top portion of the passenger side of its windshield. These numbers, I surmised, were the "stickers" U coveted.

"Those cars have stickers! Why can't we have a sticker, too? Those cars all have stickers. I want a sticker on our car."

"That's a car store. Those stickers show how much money you have to pay to buy one of those cars," I explained. "If we put a sticker in our window, then somebody could come and give us that much money, and then they would take the car, and then we wouldn't have it."

Ulysses answered quickly -- more quickly than I expected -- "We could take that money and go buy back our green car."

He was referring to the Dodge Caravan we traded in last March. We were lucky to get it while it was working to a dealer who would take it despite its quirks. We were also lucky U didn't seem traumatized by its loss, what with its being his favorite color and all. This was the first time in nearly a year that he'd mentioned it.

So this mention of the green minivan caught me by surprise. I had meant to quell the sticker campaign, but he had taken it in a new direction.

I paused, thinking how to respond.

"We don't know where that green car is," I tried.

"We can put a sticker on the gold car, and then somebody will buy the gold car, and then we can take that money and go buy back the green car."

"That green car is gone," I said. "There's no place we could go to get it. There's no way to find it."

"Somebody will give us money for this gold car, and then we can buy back the green car."

I switched to a new rationale. "But without the gold car," I said, "how will be able to go get the green car? Without a car, we won't be able to go to it."

U fell silent. It was the last word on the subject. Until the next day.

Don and I were driving U home from kindergarten. An urgent voice piped up from the second row: "Doald! We have to put a sticker in our car so someone can give us money for it so we can go get our green car back!"

Startled, Donald turned to me for interpretation. I filled him in.

By now Ulysses was pumping up the drama. "Some bad guy came and stool our green car. We need a sticker! We need that money! Doald! We have to go find the green car and get it back!"

"We traded that green car for this one," said Donald, reasonably.

"What?" said Ulysses, catching his breath.

"We made a trade," he repeated. "We traded the green car for the gold one."

"Oooh!" Ulysses crooned. "So it was the old switcheroo!"

Ulysses and Santa

2010-01-01T12:50:00.000-06:00

Picasa Web Albums - Vesna - 2009-12-05 Esquire Club Santa Breakfast

Michael Pollan is coming to town!

2009-09-22T21:39:00.004-05:00

I'm so excited! Wednesday the Lakeview Libary and Community Groundworks at Troy Gardens is having a potluck and discussion in the evening to discuss In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan as a kickoff event to his visit this week.

I'm getting up early tomorrow before work to bake an apple crisp (not low-carb, but reduced sugar, at least) made with apples from a co-worker's home orchard and from Green's Pleasant Acres, where Jennifer and U and I made our annual pilgrimage this past weekend. On Thursday, the man himself is speaking at the Kohl Center on the UW-Madison campus. On Saturday morning, it's REAP Food Group's annual Food for Thought Festival, where Pollan is the keynote speaker.

I've been a Pollan fan ever since I read his eloquent "Naturally" when it appeared as the New York Times Magazine cover story in 2001. I swooned over every beautiful word in The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World.

I don't agree with Pollan on everything, but if more people turned on to what he's saying, wow, this would be a better place. I wish Obama had taken his advice to turn those manicured acres surrounding the White House into sustainable farmland growing veg for presidential family meals and state feasts! What a message that would have been.

My main gripe – my only gripe, really – with Pollan is his anti-meat, anti-saturated fat stance. It irked me whenever it came up In Defense of Food. He consistently treated the unhealthfulness of saturated fat as a given, even though in several passages he spelled out evidence that it is not. He says humans can live healthfully without plants, but not without meat – but surely he must be aware of the Inuit and the Masai, whose traditional diets included little to no plant food.

His main arguments against eating meat turn on arguments against industrially produced meat – but every one of those can also be used as arguments against all industrially produced food, including his beloved plant leaves. Which, by the way Mike, ya can't live on eating mostly them! Environmental, ethical – all of it. The recent book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Kieth (a fellow ex-vegetarian, and a feminist – I haven't read the book yet, but I like her already!) spells out the horrific cost to animal life – in greater numbers – that factory farming exacts. Woe to the wildlife that crosses the path of a harvesting machine, for instance.

That's why I'm staying up tonight making a shirt that sasses back at his famous dictum, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Gee, I hope someday I come up with a famous dictum that people quote all over the place. In the meantime, here's the design. And, for readers who aren't familiar with it, here's the cover of his book which I'm spoofing, with Pollan's oft-quoted manifesto printed on the yellow band around the romaine. (Bibb?)

To that I say this: "Eat food. Mostly cheese."

That's my Wisconsin manifesto.

Indian Lake Hike with Reeb UU Congregation

2009-09-13T06:32:00.002-05:00

We loaded up a few carpools and headed west to Indian Lake Park. Click on the picture to view a slideshow.

Indian Lake 2

2009-09-12T06:58:00.000-05:00

Sarah Elmore organized the trip. Everyone had a great time.
Lexander found a stand of rare Indian Pipe flower. Angus found more nearby, and a trunk of tree ear mushroom.
Ulysses and me in a log cabin in a clearing.
We picnicked in the shelter after working up an appetite on the three mile hike!

Goodbye, Greyhound

2009-09-11T12:52:00.002-05:00

When we saw off Don's mother last Friday at the bus depot, we noticed a reporter type interviewing folks. We waved him over and wound up as the lede for the article he wrote!

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/article_cf6caa9c-9d77-11de-8f87-001cc4c03286.html

U's first day of school

2009-09-01T07:36:00.001-05:00

Click on the picture with the arrow to see more pictures and two short videos of U's first day of school.

Ulysses was so excited to go to "big boy school." This summer he attended a six-week K-ready program that the school system provided. This, though, is the real thing! As it happens, his teacher, Ms. Ward (white cardigan) is the same teacher who evaluated him in March and recommend the summer school. They had instant rapport.
Ulysses wore jeans that Amma (Don's mother, Janice) sent earlier and a green checked shirt and white sneakers that we bought with funds she sent for school clothes. The backpack is a one-dollar find from a yard sale Don and Amma went to. For years Amma has been saying she will come and help Ulysses with the start of kindergarten. This year, it all came true. We went shopping for school supplies a week or so ago and had them all assembled to bring in to class. Nowadays they give you a list of what to get, including some classroom supplies.

The tables were set with an apple nametag for each child. Ulysses said, "I love my nametag!"

Everything goes better with...

2009-08-20T06:04:00.003-05:00

Don's mother arrived from Savannah on the Greyhound bus Tuesday evening for a long visit. For years she's been saying she wants to be here when Ulysses starts kindergarten, and now here it is. His first day will be Sept. 1. Tonight we're all going to the elementary school for registration. He's already registered, but we can meet his teacher, see his room and so forth.

The bus rolled in from via Milwaukee around 7:30 and we stopped at the China Wok on our way home to pick up our traditional Chinese feast, as we do every time she comes to visit. This time Ulysses seemed to know what Chinese food was, or at least he crowed about it and was thrilled when Don came out of the strip mall storefront laden with a heavy bag. We had been strolling along the shrubbery-lined walkways with Don's mother, who U calls "Ama," trying to get that rubbery road trip feeling out of her legs. "Chinese food!" he called. "You got the Chinese food!"

Back home we ate what seemed vats of egg foo yung with gravy, won ton soup, pork fried rice, lo mein with all sorts of seafood and meat -- it's the Wok's house special -- beef with broccoli. We each got an egg roll, too. That was Ulysses's pick.

He had his on a plate with a plenty of duck sauce and Annie's natural ketchup. Round and round went the end of the egg roll in the custom sauce between every bite. The orange and red swirl had to be replenished once or twice over the course of the egg roll. At the end of the meal, when we lifted the plate there was a ring of crunchy bits in red sauce that had built up around it over the course of the meal, left neatly behind like a reverse stencil of some kind.

When Ama got in the fold-down futon couch/bed in the living room for the night, Ulysses jumped in with her, smiling happily. "Read me a story!" he said. "Read me the scary book!" (Bears in the Night by the Stan and Jan Berenstain.)

"I'm too tired to read a book to you," said Ama. "I'll tell you a story. A story about when I was a little girl."

Ulysses's eyes shone in anticipation.

"Once upon a time there was a little girl and her two brothers. They went walking in the woods and they found some blackberry bushes. They were the juiciest, sweetest, darkest blackberries ever."

Ulysses was fairly bouncing with joy.

"They picked and picked and picked the blackberries and then they took them home. Their mother brought out some cream...."

Ulysses burst out, "...and then they put it all in a bowl with ketchup!"

.

They hate the taste of mint

2009-08-16T07:41:00.007-05:00

Ulysses ran to the bathroom and shut both doors.

When I had called, "Bedtime!" he had sprung from his computer without a word. Now he waited for me to slip inside and reach up for the toothbrushes and toothpaste. One hand covered his mouth.

One night in June, I had been going through the excruciating nightly routine of coaxing Ulysses into the bathroom for tooth brushing. He was already in the bed, and did not intend to get back out. "Do you want me to brush your teeth for you, or do you want to brush your teeth yourself?"

"No. No tooth brushing tonight."

"That's not one of the choices. I will hold you down and brush your teeth. Is that what you choose?"

"Me, I'll brush."

"All right."

Pause.

"Come on."

Silence. Ulysses dug himself more deeply under the covers.

I was steeling myself to drag him out of the bed and carry him bodily into the bathroom when Donald spoke up.

"At bedtime, monsters come and take your teeth. But they don't take teeth that are clean and brushed. They only take dirty teeth. And they hate the taste of mint."

Ulysses sat up. Without a sound, he bolted into the bathroom and slammed both doors. I came in to find him with his hand covering his mouth. He quickly shut the door behind me.

We brushed our teeth together. He watched carefully, mimicking my every move with his own Spongebob Squarepants toothbrush. It was the lengthiest cleaning his teeth had ever had.

* * *

Since then, the nightly trial of getting to bed and brushing teeth has evaporated into this: "Bedtime!" and a dash for the bathroom, followed by a thorough application of dentifrice. I don't believe I've ever brushed my own teeth this well and this consistently, come to think of it.

He no longer shuts the doors and covers his mouth with his hand, of which I'm glad. I want him in bed and I want his teeth clean, but I don't want him traumatized, after all. After we brush our teeth every morning and night now, he likes to exhale with a proud puff and say, "I smell like mint! Monsters hate the taste of mint!"

* * *

About a month in, though, there was a wisp of rebellion. We were in the bathroom, but he wouldn't take the toothbrush.

"There are no monsters," he said. "They don't really come for your teeth."

"Oh, yes, there are," I replied. "They're so tiny that you can't see them. They're called 'germs.' Have you seen people with teeth missing? The germs ate their teeth. The germs grow in your mouth, but they can only stick to dirty teeth. That's why we scrub our teeth clean and rinse our mouths to wash the germs out and spit them down the sink."

I thought about showing him some of my own fillings, but he took his brush, convinced. Semmelweis should have had it so easy.

Who's wiping whose bottom?

2009-08-15T20:26:00.003-05:00

I was wiping Ulysses's bottom when he said to me, "Mama, I don't want to be a little boy."

"What do you want to be?" I asked.

"A big boy."

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, "You're getting bigger every day."

"Bigger than you!" he said.

"You say you're bigger than me?" I asked.

"Yes, I am!"

I thought about that. "You know, big boys wipe their own bottoms."

.

Girl suit

2009-06-21T06:37:00.006-05:00

Yesterday was a perfect summer solstice day. It was warm and bright, with puffy white clouds. By midday, the sun had burned off the humidity from the heavy rains of the late afternoon and night before, leaving a clean, clear, sky-blue heat that called us out into the yard until evening.

In the morning, when the air was still thick, redolent of chorophyll and moist earth, we all went yard sale-ing. We came home with good loot, including plenty of outdoor toys for U: a toy sting ray that can be filled with water and squeezed to deliver a far-reaching stream; a ball tee that instantly transformed Don's cousin Neil's gift of a ball and bat into one of the most played-with toys in U's pantheon (instead of a source of frustration for U, because it's darn hard to hit a ball that's in the air!); a play fountain with changeable heads that express a variety of showers; a set of plastic horseshoes that we would much rather have 5-year-old U play with than our real, toe-breakable ones.

In no time, Ulysses was stripped down and jumping from wading pool to gooey sandbox to fountain or sprinkler or the newly rediscovered frog-shaped sprinkler from another yard sale outing years ago (he changed them out frequently over the course of the day).

Whenever he carried the frog to the hose end, he turned it over and pointed out the frog's four feet, telling me with excitement, "Frog prints. Look! There are the frog prints! Do you know about frog prints?"

It was hours before I realized he had reinterpreted the phrase Frog Prince.

* * *

"I need my baby suit," said Ulysses, and he ran inside to search for his swim trunks.

"Here's your bathing suit," I said, finding it in the lowest drawer of the high boy dresser Don restored years ago, in hopes of a child to give it to.

"Not bathing suit, Mama," he corrected. "Baby suit."

"Bathing suit," I repeated.

"Baby suit," he insisted. So I dropped it.

Later, when we were splashing together under the hot sun, Ulysses saw my clothes were starting to get wet. "Take off your clothes, Mama!" he shouted, gleefully.

"I can't take off my clothes out here; I'm a grownup."

He looked puzzled at this, then said, "Then go inside and put on your girl suit."

What kind of cake? Birthday.

2009-02-14T06:57:00.008-06:00

Ulysses is into knights and castles these days, so I got the idea to make him a cake shaped like a castle, with crenolated turrets made from flat-bottomed ice cream cones, and spires of inverted pointy cones. I was going to bake in a big, rectangular pan, cut out the center for a courtyard, and build up the corner towers with the material I had cut out from the center. Graham cracker drawbridge and door. Licorice ropes.

"Ulysses, your birthday is coming," I told him a couple of weeks ago. "How would you like a cake shaped like a castle?"

"A castle cake? No," he said.

"For your birthday cake," I said. "With towers and a gate and a courtyard."

"No!" he said.

Obviously he didn't understand what I meant, I thought. I showed him some pictures of castle cakes on the Internet. "No," he said to all of them. "No cake castle."

What's with this kid? I thought. Doesn't he realize how fabulous this cake will be? I started up the conversation a few more times over the following week. It always went the same way.

Then I had a brainstorm. "Ulysses," I said, "Your birthday is coming up. I will make you any kind of cake you want, in any shape. What kind of cake would you like for your birthday?"

He answered without hesitation. "A mountain."

I was embarrassed at how silly I'd been. Whose birthday was it, anyway?

"A mountain!" I said, "Do you want your mountain to be a volcano?"

"No."

It was such a great idea, I assumed he'd misunderstood the question. I asked him a few more times, describing how the cake would look, with lava and all.

"No."

So I supposed I wasn't completely cured of whatever led me to try to feist the castle idea on him. I dropped the volcano idea and thought I'd draw out some more details.

"Do you want the mountain to have a tunnel going through it?"

"Mmmmm.... yes," he said, decisively.

Uh-oh. How on earth was I going to put a tunnel in a cake? Well, I'd walked myself right into that one. I got on the Internet and found a cake that looked promising. It even had a Thomas the Tank Engine track running through it, with trains going round and round! Perfect -- we've got all that. Donald looked at the picture and description and explained to me how it was made (he's genius at that sort of thing, unlike me). Great! I could do that!

I showed Ulysses. "Is this what you want for your birthday cake, something like this?"

He looked pleased. "Yes," he said, like a happy client to an architect who had finally figured out the assignment.

I spent some time figuring out how to put the track together on the board I'd be building the cake on. Took some pictures to guide me in reconstructing it later. Over the week, I gathered materials, and thought about how to build this thing. Emptied and cleaned a big tomato can for the tunnel (it would be slit down one side and then stretched open).

* * *

Yesterday evening, Ulysses and I were at the grocery store. I was shopping for the candies to make into jelly bean boulders, peanut cluster rocks, pretzels for logs and so forth.

I thought I'd better do a reality check. I squatted down to Ulysses, who was in the little car in front of the shopping cart, and said, "Ulysses. You know your birthday is coming." He looked at me. "I will make you any kind of cake you want for your birthday party. What kind of cake do you want?"

"A birthday cake," he said. "Round birthday cake."

"Do you want it to look like a mountain?"

He looked at me as if I had just turned purple. "No."

"Do you want a cake shaped like a mountain with a tunnel in it?'

"No."

"Do you want a mountain cake with a tunnel and a train going through it, like the picture we looked at and you said that was what you wanted for your birthday cake?"

"No! No!" His voice began to rise in panic.

"Okay, okay, you want a round birthday cake," I said, switching tracks. "Do you want it to be chocolate?"

"Yes!"

"Do you want it to be chocolate on the outside and chocolate on the inside, or yellow on the inside?"

"Chocolate outside and yellow inside," he said.

After a bit we went to the baking aisle and I showed him a cake mix with a picture on the box of a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. "Does this look like the kind of cake you want for your birthday cake?"

"Yes!" he said with excitement. I saw a flash of confusion cross his face when I put the box back on the shelf, but it was gone quickly when he heard me say, "OK. That's the kind of cake I'll make for your party."

"Yes! Birthday cake! Round! Chocolate outside, yellow inside!" he said.

So that is the current plan for the Sunday party. Meantime I already have a double batch of frosting (half is chocolate), enough for the enormous mountain, which would have used two cake recipes.

Maybe I'll make a small mountain cake for my own amusement.

A definition of fashion

2009-02-03T12:10:00.001-06:00

After all, what is fashion but some guy doing something that's not in style – first?

Kupus: Serbian cabbage soup

2009-02-01T06:12:00.001-06:00

The most fundamental heirloom recipes are often most at risk for being lost in the sands of times. Why? One reason is that "everyone knows" how to make them, and so nobody writes them down. Another is that they're so close to us, so intertwined with daily life and the act of ordinary eating, that the people who live with these recipes don't even think of them as recipes.

Consider the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. If you were raised in the USA, you might snort and say, "PBJ? You don't need a recipe for that. You just make it." And that is precisely what would make a recipe for, or a really accurate and comprehensive description of, that thing difficult to find a generation after it has gone out of style.

Years ago, I had some friends over for a writing session. I had just made a pot of soup, so I shared it with them. Never would I have dreamed of making it especially for guests; it was just ordinary soup.

They went crazy over it. They demanded the recipe. The richly flavored broth, the big, rustic chunks of well varied vegetables, the savory rings of sliced sausage – they enthused over the most ordinary features in their ordinary bowls. I was taken aback. "There is no recipe," I said, "It's just soup."

"What kind of soup?" they wanted to know.

"Cabbage soup?" I said, feeling like I was giving a flip answer. The soup was built around the cabbage. I didn't know what else to call it.

"Well, can we have the recipe for your cabbage soup?"

"Um, OK," I said, and then never did anything about it. The idea seemed weird, writing a recipe for this. Wasn't it obvious from looking at, how it was done? You go into the kitchen and start putting things into a pot until you have soup. What was there to say?

It took me years to notice that I was responding just as home cooks too often do about the everyday food that is the bedrock of their own culture's cuisine. I've been on the other side of the conversation myself, trying to pry open the oyster that somehow won't believe there's a pearl. There's no recipe. It's just minestrone. There's no recipe. It's just tempeh with onions. Or chile ancho stew, or chicken and dumplings.

And that's how stuff gets lost.

Reflecting on my ordinary soup, which seemed so inchoate, so spontaneous and free of recipe or method, I realized there was plenty I knew about it. First of all, it has a name: Kupus. The "u"s are long, as in cuckoo, and the stress is on the first syllable. It means "cabbage soup," and it's the same as the word for cabbage itself. Sauerkraut, an ingredient I'd forgotten to include for years, is called "Kiseli Kupus" (KEE-seh-lee KOO-poos), or sour cabbage. So the whole thing is sort of cabbage to the third power.

I didn't make this soup up, as I had thought (actually, I wasn't thinking). I learned it from my mother, who made it often. I do a couple of things differently than she did; she used a can of Campbell's vegetable or cream of mushroom soup to fortify the broth, while I use a couple of
cups of my homemade stock -- the type I usually have on hand is chicken. I use a wider range of root veg also. I remember her using potato and carrot; I like to include parsnip and rutabaga as well.

Also, I include the soft, inner green leaves of a celery bunch in my aromatics, sauteeing it along with the onion. This is a trick I learned from my macrobiotic years, along with the roll cut, which I use for the parsley.

This is one of those dishes that everyone makes, and everyone makes a little differently. My mother made it different ways, too: sometimes with a hamhock, sometimes with no meat at all, sometimes with kielbasa as I've described below. We called whatever sausage we used "kobasica" (ko-BAH-seet-sa), the Serbian word for sausage. The vegetable combo varied, too.

Kupus is a wonderful, comforting soup, especially in wintertime. I love to have plenty of broth in my bowl, and I always take an extra moment to select a spoon that will be pleasant to sip from. I like to have a big chunk of cabbage in my bowl, and carve off bits with the spoon as I go.

The simplicity of the seasoning is, I think, elegant: salt, bay leaves, parsely. Whole peppercorns exude a soft, ember-like warmth that grinding shatters and sharpens (I've tried); it's key to the soup's character. Parsnips, rutabagas, even potatoes -- these are optional. Whole peppercorns are essential.

Kupus (Serbian cabbage soup)

Ingredients (listed in the order they're added to the pot)

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, sliced
• the inside of a bunch of celery, including leaves and tender shoots
• 2 outer stalks of celery, cut in 1/2" crescents
• 4 carrots, cut in 1/2" rings
• 2 parsnips, roll cut
• 1/2 rutabaga, cut in 1/4" x 1/4" x 3/4" slabs
• 2 cups homemade chicken stock or beef stock, brought to the boil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 10 whole peppercorns
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley, or 3 tablespoons dried parsley
• 1 small cabbage, or 1/2 cabbage, cut in chunks that include the core
• 2–3 medium potatoes, scrubbed and cut in 8 or • 12 pieces (cut longways, then 3 or 4 horizontal cuts)
• 1–2 packages of Polish kielbasa (or ring baloney, or a big hamhock), cut in 1/2" rings
• 2 cups sauerkraut, with the juice (Gundelsheimer is my favorite!)
• several cups water, brought to the boil

You will need a big pot, at least 6 quarts capacity.

Heat the oil in the pot over medium-low. Add onions and cook until they're a light golden brown, about 10 minutes. Add the inner parts of the celery and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Add the carrots, parsnips and rutabagas. They don't need to hit the pot at the same time; just keep prepping and adding to the pot as you get them ready.

In a separate pot, heat the stock to a boil and add it to your sauteed veg. Add the salt, peppercorns, bay leaves and parsely. From this point on, it is not necessary to stir after adding anything.

In yet another pot, or a tea kettle, bring several cups of water to boil, but don't add it just yet.

Prep and add the cabbage. When you prep the cabbage, don't cut out the core. That's essential for keeping it in big chunks that stay together during cooking. Just slice off the very bottom, if it looks brownish to you, and discard the outer leaves. Then cut lengthwise through the core to quarter it, and then cut that horizontally into pieces. You'll also have lots of leafy pieces that aren't connected to the core. After you add the cabbage, start a timer for one hour.

Add the potatoes. Add the kielbasa. Add the sauerkraut.

Add hot water until the pot is full to about two inches from the top. Everything should be submerged.

Your soup will be done one hour after you added the cabbage. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more salt if needed.

Grind some fresh pepper over the individual servings. It's a different kind of heat than the warmth of the cooked peppercorns. In case you didn't know, don't eat the bay leaves!

Enjoy this soup with some rustic bread for dipping, or all by itself. This is a filling meal in a bowl.

I'm a volunteer!

2009-01-24T06:41:00.005-06:00

I just signed up to be a volunteer recipe tester for Cook's Country magazine, which I love. If I had to pick a favorite magazine, I'd have to say CC edges out even Cook's Illustrated in my affections, because of the 50's-ish retro production style, what with its ever-so pastel-cast color photos and lightly country elements.

Supposedly I'll be getting notifications of recipes to test every couple of weeks. I can try them or skip them as I please. After I prepare the dish, I send in my notes.

I get to give Cook's Country my two cents! And to think, I was just telling someone my dream job would be as a writer and tester in their kitchens.

Close enough for now!

Dan i Noć (Day and Night Serbian bar cookies)

2009-01-09T20:39:00.010-06:00

I've always loved the name of these cookies – "Dan i Noć" (pro nounced "DAHN ee NOCH,") translates as "Day and Night." They show their sense in such a forthright way. Day and night: a light layer and a dark layer. What could be more sensible? The layer of apricot jam between the day and the night makes sense, too: a shimmering sunset – or perhaps a sunrise – of transluscent orange.

These cookies – or little cakes, as you might consider them – are generous and rich. The recipe includes a pound of butter, a dozen eggs, darn close to a half pound of chocolate, a whole jar of apricot preserves. Speaking of which, I recommend spending the extra couple of bucks to get really good apricot preserves. Look for apricots as the first ingredient, and real sugar as opposed to high-fructose corn syrup or other sweeteners. (Fruit-only sweetened is good, too.) If you buy more than one jar and do a side-by-side taste test at home, you will see how big a difference it really makes.

I remember having these at the home of my aunt and uncle when we would visit around Christmastime. it was one of the sitni kolaći (little cookies) specialties of my Grandaunt Naka (b. 1913), whom I shared more about here. Like Naka's Vanil Grancle, these feature apricots, that grow so well around her native town of Kikinda.

My cousin tells me Naka got the the recipe from her best friend, also from Kikinda. The best friend's family helped Naka's family in some way during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, but I don't know the story beyond that.

Here's Ulysses in January 2008 (nearly four years old in this picture) enjoying a piece of Dan i Noć.

Shortly after this photo was taken, that laptop stopped working. Turned out it was plugged up with cookie crumbs.

I'm posting this today as a hat tip to my niece, Anne (she is the daughter of my cousin, and by the Serbian way of looking at family relations, that makes her more of a niece to me than anything else), 7. She loves Dan i Noć, and was sad to discover there wasn't any at the family get-together in Baltimore this year. My cousin wrote, "She was really, really bummed when she heard that no one made dan i noc. I remembered telling her to choose either gitar [another exceptional sitni kolacic in the family, I'll post that recipe too] or dan i noc as her favorite and she chose gitar so that's what i made but it seems i may have forgotten to tell her why i was asking. she got tears in her eyes, made me so sad!

"so this weekend we're making dan i noc. that works because i wouldn't have had time to make it with her before Bozic [Serbian Christmas] this time and making it together is just as important as having it for Bozic!"

Here's Anne last year (she was Annie then) enjoying the Dan i Noć she made with her mother for Božić 2008.

Recipe: Dan i Noć

Filling
1 jar apricot preserves

Noć (Night)
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 medium eggs (or 5 large)
6 squares (or 6 ounces chips) semisweet baking chocolate (each square is one ounce)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Dan (Day)
Same ingredients as the Noć, but without the chocolate:
2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
6 medium eggs (or 5 large)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

1. Melt chocolate
Melt the chocolate. Use low heat and stir often, so the chocolate won't seize or scorch. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, a flame tamer, or a double boiler if you have one. By the time you add the chocolate to other ingredients, it should be liquidy, but cool enough that it won't cause the eggs to cook on contact.

2. Soft-bake the Noć
Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs one at a time. Stir in the chocolate and vanilla.

Whisk together flour and baking powder. Mix these dry ingredients into the wet mixture. This will make a soupy batter.

Line a rectangular baking pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil. No greasing is needed. Pour in the batter. Shake sideways, or rap the pan sharply against your counter, to knock out extra air bubbles. You can see in my photos that I missed this step – see what happen?

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. It needs to be firm enough that you can spread jam over it, but not baked through, That is, at this point a toothpick inserted in it will not come out anywhere near clean.

3. Prep the Dan
While the Noć is in the oven, prepare the batter for the Dan. Cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs one at a time, beat in vanilla, whisk together flour and baking powder, stir dry mix into wet mix.

4. Apply the jam layer
Remove from oven. Spread the apricot preserves evenly over the dark Noć layer while still warm.

5. Add the Dan layer
Carefully pour the light batter evenly overtop the contents of the pan.

6. Final bake
Put the pan back in the oven for another 30 minutes, or until a knife (or cake pick) inserted in the center comes out clean. The instructions I received say to check the Dan, but I found that the Noć took longer to bake through, so make sure your Dan and your Noć are baked throughout.

The Dan will be beautifully golden brown on top. If the Dan is as browned as it needs to be, but the cake inside still needs more baking, cover the pan tightly with foil (or place a cookie sheet over it) so the top won't overbake.

7. Cool and cut
Let cool. Carefully lift the whole cake from the pan and transfer to a large cutting surface. Slice into rectangular pieces about the width and length of your index finger. Cut carefully and methodically so that your pieces are evenly sized, with straight sides and square corners. I used the patterns on my wooden cutting board as my guides.

The finger-sized pieces are lovely and make hearty portions of this rich dessert. However, after a while I cut some of them into thirds, and found this size makes a wonderful bite-sized treat.

Bozic - Serbian Christmas 2009

2009-01-07T23:50:00.003-06:00

It was great taking a couple of days of work to putter in the kitchen and make these heritage meals. After work our friend Gigi came over, hooray, our Serbian holiday co-celebrant as I've said before. Especially great to have her here because we've missed her on the last couple of occasions.

Corba od Patlidzan - otherwise known as tomato soup

2009-01-06T20:21:00.007-06:00

I pulled off the Badnje Vece meal more smoothly than ever this year! Not like the years that I would finally get everything (that I hadn't forgotten) on the table by 11 pm. I got eight courses set out before 7 pm, and I only spent the last hour working full throttle. I even made the kidney bean salad from a deeper scratch – dried beans that I soaked overnight, rather than a can. My testimonial: it's different, and it's even better. It has an ineffable homemade quality. The beans are a little grainier in texture, very nice.

Donald gave me props on the tomato soup. Since I threw it together without a recipe, just putting everything into the pot that I thought would be good to find in tomato soup, I figured I'd better write it down fast while I remember what I did.

Remember, it has to be animal-product free. So I had to stop myself from reaching for the butter and the homemade chicken stock!

Corba od patlidzan
(CHOR-ba od paht-LEE-jahn, with the "j" as in "Jack")

4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large onion, diced
1 clove garlic, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
2 tablespoons AP flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
several fresh grindings black pepper
2 bay leaves
1-2 shakes red pepper flakes
4 tablespoons (approx) fresh or frozen fresh parsley
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes, juice and all

In a deep, heavy pot or Dutch oven, heat the oil. Add the onions and cook over medium heat until cleared and beginning to brown. Add the garlic and celery partway through this onion cooking process.

Add the flour and stir well. Let the flour cook in for a few minutes. Add salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, bay leaves, parsley and tomatoes. Fill the tomato can with water and add it to the pot.

Simmer, covered, about a half hour. Stir occasionally, making sure it doesn't stick and scorch on the bottom.

If you like, you can blend this smooth when you're done, or strain it. But I don't care so much for perfectly smooth soups, myself. I like it rustic.

Badnje Vece – Serbian Christmas Eve – Menu

2009-01-05T19:03:00.007-06:00

Tomorrow, January 6, will be Serbian Christmas Eve. Technically, it's called Badnji Dan during the day, and in the evening Badnje Vece. If you guess that "Dan" means day and "Vece" evening from this, you'd be correct. But as I remember, we always just called it Badnje Vece, all day long, in my household growing up.

The photo shows my Badnje Vece table from 2005. Here's my blog post from that year.

I wrote a bunch about Serbian Christmas (Bozic) customs in an article several years ago. Here's a link to it on my online article archive:
http://vesnaswriting.blogspot.com/2009/01/serbian-christmas.html

Badnje Vece is a day of fasting from meat, fowl, dairy and egg products. But it's not a vegan day! The main course of the Badnje Vece dinner is fish.

The traditional menu for this meal is extensive. And, meat and dairy or no, it is as filling a repast as any I've experienced. In the early 1990s, my mother, who was born in 1920 in Ruma, a town in Srem, near Belgrade, described the Badne Vece meals she remembered from her youth. I wrote it down in my recipe notebook. Here's what she told me.

Badnje Vece menu

Kolac on the table, but not eaten until Bozic proper
Fruit – cooked prunes
Posna pogaca (flatbread)
Corba od patlidjan (tomato soup)
Pasulj (kidney bean and onion salad)
Rezanci c makom (noodles with ground poppy seed)
Rezanci c badem (noodles with almonds)
Riba (fish)

In addition, a friend told me that apples with nuts and honey are also traditional. Just slice the apples and put out a little bowl of ground walnuts and a little bowl of honey. These are put together on the fly, one at a time, by the eater – like chips and salsa. You pick up an apple slice and dip the end into the honey. Then you dip the honeyed, sticky end into the walnuts. Presto: you've prepared yourself one lovely bite of apple with nuts and honey.

The beans are delicious, and so easy to make. Here's the recipe my mother gave me. I doubt her household had canned beans in the 1920s, but it's possible, as her grandparents owned a general store. If there were commercial canned beans at that time, that's where they would be, after all.

Pasulj
(Kidney bean salad)

one can light red kidney beans, including the liquid
one small onion, diced (about 1/3 cup)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1/8 teaspoon salt
several grindings of pepper
1/2 tablespoon white vinegar
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

Mix all in a bowl.

Chill at least a few hours, or overnight.

Happy new year!

2009-01-01T21:09:00.008-06:00

(Scroll down to get to a fabulous recipe for Hoppin' John!)

For the first time in years, New Year's Day was a relaxing vacation day at home -- paid time off, to boot. The past two years, I went to my job on Jan. 1. The year before that, I don't remember -- I guess I stayed home along with most other co-workers. Before that, though, when Don and I were driving cab, Jan. 1 was a day to recover from the most grueling, busy night of a cabbie's year.

But this was the first that I recall devoting Jan. 1 to a leisurely day off. It was a great way to start the year.

On and off during the day I puttered in the kitchen, making New Year's Day foods that are traditional either for me and Don personally or for a larger audience. Here's what we had.

Deviled Eggs

This is a tradition Don and I started the first New Year's we spent together, when 1992 became 1993. The two of us were together in our little basement apartment on Gorham Street, and as the clock wound down, I let out that I regretted we hadn't planned anything, we didn't have anything special lined up to happen at the stroke of midnight. Don sprang into action. He pulled out his old Slovak Cookbook that he'd gotten from his grandmother and found some fast, fun, festive recipes – cheese puffs and deviled eggs -- and made both happen in the 40 minutes remaining. Since then, we've made deviled eggs every year and cheese puffs some years. The eggs, especially, make perfect sense as a new year's tradition. Eggs and birth and newness and all that.

Beaten Biscuits

Egg Nog

Made by cooking egg yolks in milk over a gentle flame until slightly thickened and appealingly creamy, with the addition of a little sugar and vanilla. This is really a potable custard -- a like baked custard, except you can drink it. I love custard. And with egg nog, you can add rum.

Hopping John (Hoppin' John)

Black-eyed peas with smoked pork and rice is a traditional New Year's dish in the South, and, as Wikipedia tells me, throughout the Carribbean also. It's said to bring good luck in the coming year.

Flouting recipes we've read, we do not cook the rice with the beans. The cooking times of rice and beans are incompatible, and if you don't want mush rice (or pebble beans), it's neater to cook them separately and plate individual composites. This makes starch control easier too; I can get just a taste of rice with my pork and beans if I choose.

It's not strictly necessary to soak dry black-eyed peas overnight, but we do it routinely. Soaking any kind of whole seed wakes up the life force and makes it more nourishing. Soaking and rinsing beans washes away potentially toxic compounds. This latter reasoning is less new-agey than the former; our friend landed in the hospital after making a habit of cooking unsoaked, unrinsed beans. He very nearly died. Please soak and rinse all dry beans! (Do I need to mention that this does not apply to canned beans?)

Hopping John recipe

2 cups black-eyed peas, soaked overnight and rinsed thoroughly
8 to 16 ounces smoked pork jowl, cut in 1/2" to 1" chunks
1 t0 2 tablespoons bacon fat (reserved from cooking bacon) or any oil or fat you choose
1 onion, diced
1 stalk celery (plus half the leaves from the core of the celery, if you have them), sliced
2 cups stock, heated
1 teaspoon salt

Heat fat in a Dutch oven or any heavy pot or saucepan of at least three quarts capacity. Over medium heat, cook onions and celery until softened. Add pork jowl and cook together for a few minutes.

Add the beans. Add the hot stock. Add the salt. Simmer over low heat for about one hour, or until the beans are soft.

Serve over rice.

Not even in effigy

2008-12-28T09:10:00.006-06:00

The chocolate coins are all eaten but one, a golden dollar that escaped (for now), and shiny disks of chocolate-tinged foil are turning up all around the house.

The contents of the clear plastic candy-cane shaped tubes bearing Hershey's Kisses and gummy Krabby Patties (the burger Spongebob makes at his fry-cook day job) are virtually empty.

Even the hard, essentially flavorless, little Spongebob-shaped Pez-like bits have all disappeared (down the sink, in the case of the ones Ulysses gave to me, one after another, that I surreptitiously and temporarily stashed on a platter of turkey debris).

Yet the merry row of seven chocolate Santas remains intact.

On Christmas Day, when Ulysses unwrapped a long, light, rectangular package to find a box of brightly wrapped Santas, he was delighted.

"Open this box, open, open!"

He inspected the Santas and pried from the blister bedding the rightmost one, a jolly fellow in red against a green background. Carefully, eagerly, he peeled away the foil wrapper to hold the bare chocolate Santa between forefinger and thumb. He lifted it to his mouth. He stopped.

Ulysses held the chocolate figurine a litle farther from his face and regarded it for several seconds.

"I can't do it," he said, finally. "I can't eat Santa."

He looked up at us dolefully.

"Do you want me to put the wrapper back on?" said Donald.

Ulysses nodded.

A few moments of careful re-wrapping later -- the foil hadn't come off in one piece -- and Santa was back with his brethren.

And there he remains to this day.

Christmas Eve evening 2008: Santa burnout

2008-12-24T22:10:00.013-06:00

In the evening, I pulled out some sugar-cookie dough I'd made a month ago and defrosted today. The Cook's Country recipe using yolks only, no whites. They tout that it can be rerolled a zillion times without toughening, thanks to leaving out the tough protein of the egg whites. They're right.

"Ulysses, I'm going to make some cookies for Santa. Do you want to make cookies with me?"

"Yes!" He jumped off the couch, where he was watching The Nightmare Before Christmas, or maybe it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by that point. He found his miniature rolling pin in his toy kitchen and ran to the kitchen. He ran to the dough on the counter and held up the pin. I invited him to pick out some cookie cutters from the pile on the kitchen table. He went to the table and looked at them.

Then I saw something in his eyes retreat, disengage.

"I gotta watch Cars," he said.

I stopped myself from saying that Cars is not a Christmas movie. I put it in the player, but by the time the menu had come up, he was playing a video game at his computer. "Do you want to make cookies with me?"

"No," he said.

He never did watch Cars that evening, but neither did he respond again, after that, when we reminded him that Santa was coming tonight. All day, he'd bounced and bounded at the mention of it. By now, it seemed, his emotions had been so thoroughly stimulated, they had just gone into overload.

He was withdrawing, for emotional safety, I thought. The obvious corollary of that, I realized later that night, was that his emotions were vulnerable and raw. They could now be readily abraded, inflamed.

* * *

I made sugar cookies in holiday shapes and colors: green wreaths and trees with little balls of many colors and with royal icing bows and garlands; red Santas with icing for the fur at his wrists, cap and ankles; reindeer with red noses; stars with turbinado sugar sparkles. I assembled a plate, including one of the trees, for Santa's visit later that night, and set it on the dining table.

Ulysses plucked a green Christmas tree from the cooling rack. "I'm eating Santa's cookie," he said, happily. How cute, I thought.

Several minutes later, he came over from his video play again and took another tree cookie.

Several minutes after that, I noticed that Ulysses had picked up the fourth and final tree. Earlier, I had asked Don if he had any requests for cookie shapes. He had told me, "I want a Christmas tree."

"Oops! Sorry," I told Ulysses. "You can't have that one. That's Tata's tree." I plucked it from his hand. "Sorry, we need to leave that one for him. Here are the other cookies. Which one would you like?"

"No! No! I want the tree!" he cried, making a grab for the cookie in my hand.

Uh-oh.

"How about this flower?"

"No! Not a blue cookie."

"A heart?"

"Not a red one!"

"All right. How about this wreath? It's green."

"No! It's broken!" It had a scalloped center cut out of it. Much like the blown glass ornaments that had offended his aesthetic sensibilities earlier that day. "I want a tree!"

"I'm sorry, this is the last one. It's for Tata. He'll be said if it's gone." I couldn't back off now. I'd established a cookie ownership and I had to follow through. The ownership of this item had to stand. The person whose cookie it was had to be respected.

"Where are the another tree cookies?"

"You ate yours. You ate mine, too," I added dryly, and only for my own amusement. "But that's OK, I let you have mine," I said, to soften the last remark, before continuing with my lesson: "This last one is for Tata and we need to leave it for him."

Don came out of the back computer room. "What's going on?" I filled him in. He said, "It's OK, Ulysses, you can have my tree cookie. I'm giving you my tree cookie." Don tried to hand it to him.

"No, no!" said Ulysses, in tears. "It's your cookie. I can't eat it, I can't. And I ate Mama's cookie!" He collapsed into sobs, falling onto the floor.

I suddenly realized that he grasped the situation far more deeply than I had imagined.

"Ulysses," I said, "Would you like me to make some more tree cookies?"

He fell silent. He looked up at me.

"Would you like me to make more tree cookies for everyone?"

"Yes!" he said, and sprang up.

"You can help me if you like," I said. "You don't have to, though."

He ran to his computer and plunged back into his game.

Fortunately, I still had some dough. Half an hour later, there were six perfect, bedecked Christmas trees on the cooling rack. "Ulysses!" I called.

Ulysses walked over, quietly, and surveyed the little green trees. He picked up three of them.

He ran to the bedroom, where Don was watching TV.

"Here, Tata, this is for you."

He ran back to me and handed me a tree. "This is for you, Mama."

With the third cookie in his hand, he sat down at his video game.

* * *

It wasn't until much later that I considered the tree cookie that had been on Santa's plate all through the conflict.

I could have let Ulysses have the tree cookie that he picked up from the cooling rack, without ever saying a word about whose cookie was whose. There would have been no issue if the trees were simply gone the next time he came grazing. Meantime, I could have taken the tree cookie off Santa's plate and put it out of sight for Don, for later.

I didn't.

I didn't even dream of disturbing the plate I'd prepared for Santa. Because ... because those were Santa's cookies. It wouldn't be right to take away his tree. I had made four trees. One for each of us.

I'd hypnotized myself into respecting the rights of a fictional character.

Christmas Eve 2008

2008-12-24T19:11:00.008-06:00

I just reread this blog entry from last Christmas Eve – http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2007/12/adorable-christmas-anecdotes.html – and was struck by the magnitude of difference in Ulysses today: his comprehension, the abstraction of his thoughts, his articulation of them. Last year he was in the moment in such a way – there was no use describing to him a distant future.

This year he's been anticipating Santa's visit for weeks, announcing regularly that tonight was the night. We pointed to the day on the calendar as it approached, showing him, "We're here, this is today. Santa's coming on this day." It was hard to see his scope of comprehension, but probably a safe guess that it wasn't total. I should have told him it was a map of time, because he understands maps. (Thanks, Dora.)

On the morning of Christmas Eve, we told him that this was the big day -- that Santa was in fact coming tonight, that we had a lot to do to get ready. He was elated. We drove out to storage to pick up the tree and decorations, then to the supermarket for figgy pudding ingredients. Would you believe Copps, giant as it is, doesn't carry suet, while our neighborhood market does? It's in the same chaotically, gloriously mixed case of ethnic speciality animal parts as the chitterlings, necks, feet and other tidbits for the adventerous. Or the traditional. Depending on your point of view.

I set White Christmas to play on the DVD. Don got out the battery-powered Christmas train while I prepped the tree area. We stood the 5-foot square cedar play table (built by Don in 2006) on its side against the bookshelf to clear the living room corner. The toy bins that live under the table went into Ulysses' room. I remembered the white vinyl that been discarded at my workplace that I'd brought home for another project, and Don brought it in. We cut parts of it and made a tree skirt about 8-foot square, large enough for the train to run on its extended length track for the first time. We discovered that the other side had been printed on -- it was the color of winter sky, with a field of irregularly placed soft white dots. Snowfall! How fortuitous was that? Or maybe the dots were the printing error that caused the banner to be jettisoned. Either way, it worked for us. We draped the play table with the blue side out, a much better backdrop for the tree than bare wood.

Throughout, Ulysses played on, under and within the enormous length and width of vinyl. As soon as the snow pattern was revealed, he jumped on it with his bare feet. "Cold! It's so cold! Ouch, ouch!" he shouted, gleefully jumping from foot to foot. "Brrr, snow," he said. Next he made an "igloo" of the cavernous mounds, pulling me under with him, insisting that I also complain of the cold. It was hot under that vinyl.

There was a bit of a snag when we eventually cut up his ice fields and igloos for tree skirting and background draping, and then folding up the rest to put away. "My igloo!" he said, horrified. "You broke it!" Then I pulled out the box containing the Christmas tree. I showed him the label, with a photograph of the contents.

"Mama!" he said, excited, "We have to make the Christmas tree beautiful."

Ulysses enthusiastically pitched in to help string the lights, hang the delicate glass ornaments and unpack and set out the trees and buildings and people of the miniature village. Consider this word, "help," with circumspection. For instance, he tended to hang the ornaments not on the branches, but the needles thereon. Matching ornaments, he believed, should properly all hang on the same branch tip.

I moved into high parenting gear to prevent electrocutions, injury and excessive breakage. Don split for the far end of the house and shut the door.

An hour later, the tree was done and only one ornament, a green glass ball, had paid the price. Ulysses had been batting it around on its branch, not heeding my warnings: "Ulysses! Be gentle with that. It's fragile. This breaks very easily. It can cut you."

"No, this is not fragile," he insisted. He gripped at it, and it collapsed into shards between his fingers. A moment of shock, then howling tears. "I cut my hand! The orn'ment broke! My green orn'ment!"

His hand was not cut. Whew.

After a few moments, he was ready to be consoled with a different, identical green ornament that he hung on the same branch. He moved on, but not before he batted at it – gently – to, fro and to again, announcing, "Be careful. This breaks very easily!"

Then there were the fancy glass ornaments,the kind with the deeply indented, faceted centers. Ulysess saw one and declared it broken.

"It's not broken," I said. "It's fine. This is the design. It looks this way on purpose."

"It is broken," he insisted.

"Look, there's nothing wrong with it," I said, angling it so we could see directly into the indented pattern.

It was broken. During storage, the wire for hanging had punched through the thin wall of indented glass from within.

Oops.

After I'd thrown out the broken pieces, I brought out another ornament of the same type.

"No," said Ulysses. "It's broken."

This one was not broken. But he was having no truck with any of the tray of center-dented ornaments that seemed to splinter dramatically in upon themselves. "These are broken," he insisted.

I replaced their lid and put them back in the ornament box for the season.

Ulysses regarded the half-dressed tree. "That's not beautiful," he said, and looked on the verge of tears.

"We're not done yet."

"But it's not beautiful, Mama!" He whimpered.

"Then let's keep trying. Look at this one!"

"It's a egg!" he said.

"Yes! This is a goose egg from our friend Cindy and our friend Troy. They brought it to us from ..." I couldn't remember the country they'd visited. "... Eastern Europe!"

"A egg, a egg! Two eggs!" Happy again, he set to work trying to hang the elaborately painted goose eggs on the same needle of a single branch, and didn't mind when I helped him pick out two different branches instead. Peace had been restored.

Later: "Mama! The Christmas tree is beautiful! We made it beautiful! Together!"

Baka Ljubica's Vanilice crescents

2008-12-22T20:02:00.009-06:00

This recipe of my grandmother's comes to me from my aunt, who fortunately has kept the recipe all these years. These were my Ujka (uncle) Sava's favorite cookies when he was a little boy.

Just to give an idea of the timelines involved here, my grandmother Ljubica (b. Stefanovich) Jankovic was born in 1888, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My mother was born in 1920, and her brother (my uncle), was born in 1923. So, want to talk about an heirloom recipe, this is it.

A few notes: my grandmother, who we called Baka, did not use an egg. However, these cookies are very fragile without one. When my aunt (my Ujna) would make these for my Ujka, she started adding an egg for strength. I made these for the first time this month, specifically to ship to my Ujka and family for Christmas, and I didn't want to take any chances with shipping a box of broken cookies, so I used the egg variant.

These hyper-vanilified cookies use a whopping two tablespoons of vanilla in a batch. Not only that, but they're dusted with vanilla sugar. Baka would place a vanilla bean in powdered sugar for a week or so in advance of making these cookies, and have a wonderfully perfumed sugar to dust with. If you don't want to incur the expense of a vanilla bean, you can pour a teaspoon or so of vanilla into a container and then place two cups of powdered sugar right on top, and wait a few days or weeks for a similar effect.

I didn't plan ahead, and I found myself making the cookies the day before I needed to ship them. Not enough time to make vanilla sugar! So I placed vanilla directly into the resealable container in which I was packing the cookies, and packed the cookies in powdered sugar. The result: I had a great insulator for my cookies that protected them from breakage, and by the time the cookies arrived by UPS ground, and then were opened a couple of days later, the powdered sugar had become vanilla sugar!

Vanilice
(Vah-NEE-leet-seh)
Serbian vanilla crescents

3 cups all-purpose flour
10 tablespoons sugar
3 sticks unsalted butter
2 cups walnuts, finely ground (use food processor or coffee grinder)
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
1 whole egg (optional – will make cookies less fragile)
vanilla powdered sugar to garnish (directions below, you need to make this vanilla sugar in advance)

Mix together all ingredients except egg and powdered sugar.

Add egg, if using, and mix in.

When ingredients are combined, form a small ball, a tablespoon or so and then shape the ball into a crescent. I found that the prettiest crescents are made like this: Shape a tablespoon of dough into a ball. Roll the ball back and forth between your palms until it forms a rope the width of your palms. Roll the rope with a few more back-and-forth motions. The ends of the rope will extend beyond your palms, but will be tapered. Shape this into a crescent, with the points nearly touching.

Place the crescents on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake at 350 until just barely browned, about 10 min.

Remove from oven. Place on cooling racks.

Meanwhile, prep a pan, like a lasagna pan, with the powdered vanilla sugar. While still warm but no longer hot, drop several crescents at a time into the sugar and roll them around, shaking the pan, until they're well coated.

Make the vanilla sugar several days ahead of time by pounding a vanilla bean into the powdered sugar with a mortar and pestle. Or, put vanilla extract at the bottom of a container of powdered sugar several days ahead of time. The vanilla flavor and aroma will infuse the powdered sugar.

How to tell a present

2008-12-22T16:19:00.005-06:00

Most every night we put on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and drift off to sleep with it running. A timer turns off the TV after a while. Ulysses has been hearing that theme music, with its signature transition from futuristically, whisperingly quiet to blood-stirringly horn laden (woe betide your sleep if you're only halfway into slumber by the end credits), nearly every night since before he was even born. (Some nights we play Galaxy Quest instead.)

The other night U and I were watching “Parallels,” a final-season episode featuring Lieutenant Commander Worf, the first Kingon to serve in Starfleet. The opening scenes feature a surprise birthday party for him. Mr. Worf is on the cranky side, as a matter of character. He is visibly embarrassed and annoyed as his crew mates lustily sing the rendition of “Happy Birthday” that they've laboriously translated into Klingon in his honor.

“It wasn't easy to translate,” says Counselor Troi to a still-scowling Worf. “There doesn't seem to be a Klingon word for 'jolly,'”

Ulysses was loving it. “Happy birthday, Mr. Worf!” he said. “It's a party!”

Then the birthday cake is brought out. In close-up, a long knife drives into an especially fudgy and moist chocolate-on-chocolate cake. The relative extreme of the visual is needed for later in the story, when the variety of cake is revealed to be a plot point.

Ulysses was delighted by all the chocolateyness. “Cake! He has a birthday cake! Happy birthday, Mr. Worf!” he crowed as the Klingon, still scowling, passes around plates heaped with gooey slabs.

Next come the presents. Data hands Worf a big, flat, beribboned rectangle of shiny wrapping paper. (Everything is metallic in the future.) “A present!” Ulysses said, happily.

Worf tears off the paper to reveal ... “A ... painting,” he says, trying hard to be polite, but unable to conceal his confusion at the inscrutable tangle of bright, abstract shapes. Data explains that it's his expressionist interpretation of a great Klingon battle. “I am honored,” says Worf, but the subtext is unmistakable: “This thing is awful – and I'm stuck with it!”

“That's not a present,” Ulysses said, mirroring Worf's reaction.

“Sure, it's a present from Data,” I said.

“No,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “It's a painting.”

“The present is the painting,” I said. “The painting is a present.”

“That's no present,” he said, shaking his head. He looked closely at me. How could I not see something that was so obvious to both him and Mr. Worf? Didn't I grasp Mr. Worf's reaction on tearing open the wrapping? Couldn't I feel it? Ulysses seemed to be casting about for a way to convey it to me. Finally, he found a way to get it across in terms I should understand.

“That's no present. It's not a toy.”

Grandaunt Naka's Vanil Grancle

2008-12-21T20:05:00.029-06:00

In the past, I've blogged about these exquisite little jam-filled Serbian sandwich cookies that are a family heirloom. See:

http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2008/02/vanilice-va-nee-leet-seh-serbian.html
and
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2005/12/vanilice-serbian-holiday-cookies.html

Those posts told the story of my attempt to recreate, from memory, my Grandaunt Naka's Vanil Grancle (VAH-neel GRAHNT-sleh).

Today I share the exciting news that I managed to get the original recipe! My grandaunt had written down her recipe.

In Western genealogical terms, I guess she's not really a grandaunt to me, as that refers to the aunt of one's parents. But it's the only term that seems to make sense. Yulia (b. Joanovic) Pecic, whom we all called Naka, was my aunt's mother. More specifically, she was the mother of the wife of the brother of my mother. The mother of my mother's sister-in-law. Get it?

Born in 1913, Naka was from Kikinda, a municipality in what's today the Serbian Banat, part of a larger historical and geographical region known as the Banat, which happens to be extraordinarily well suited for the cultivation of apricots.

The Banat overall straddles three nations, as the borders are drawn today: Serbia, Romania and Hungary. The word can be loosely translated as "province," and whereas once there were lots of banats within the Austro-Hungarian empire and within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, this is the area that's meant when you just say "Banat" or "The Banat." It's more or less identical to a region called "The Banat of Temeswar" that was circumscribed by an 18th century treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, by which the area was within the Kingdom of Hungary but controlled by the Ottomans. Or something like that.

Kikinda is also in the Voivodina, a word that means a sort of duchy (a "voivod" would be a duke), which has historically been an autonomous region relative to the succession of empires, kingdoms and nation-states that have surrounded it. Or something like that. The Voivodina encompasses at least the Serbian part of the Banat, as near as I can figure.

But don't take my word for all this. Poke around on Wikipedia and the many other sources available on the Net and in print, and if you can figure it out better, let me know. I'm no expert. (And by the way, the experts disagree.)

At any rate, when Naka's mother was born, in 1870, Kikinda was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

These cookies represent the intersection of the horticultural tradition of apricot growing in the Banat with the sophistication of Austro-Hungarian cuisine, especially its culinary tradition of baked sweets.

* * *

Earlier this month, I tried out the recipe and sent a batch of grancle east to Baltimore, where my cousins and my uncle and aunt sampled them just this weekend. They report success! The recipe yields a cookie that's true to the original.

The only thing yet to work on, though, is the thickness of the cookie. The pictures you see show a cookie about twice as high as the original. The instructions below will yield cookies that are thinner and have a more favorable jam-to-cookie ratio than the ones in the photo. Also they'll be less of a Dagwood experience to get your teeth around.

Over the decades, I had misremembered the name of Vanil Grancle as Vanilice (vah-NEEL-eet-she). Vanilice, or vanilitse, it turns out, is a different Serbian cookie altogether. In fact, my uncle Sava's favorite cookie from his boyhood was my grandmother's Vanilice. Fortunately, I was able to get the recipe for that from my aunt, via my cousin. I'll give that in a different post

Here's my cousin in early 2008, comparing the photo and description of my 2006 cookies to Naka's grancle.

your vanilice look just like my grandmother naka's granzle (grantsle) except her top round circle cut out was smaller. they were my favorite cookies growing up and haven't had them since she passed away 5 years ago. she used to make them up until the time she died, despite the fact that her hands were almost crippled from arthitis and i used to eat each one slowly and carefully thinking of her crippled fingers making them lovingly for us.

mama never did make these herself, again the apricot jam connection to naka's recipes, wonder if they are austro-hungarian influenced because banat was occupied by austro-hungarian empire.

baka's recipe that mama recalls is the crescent. i just realized that if you remember a friend of our family saying they baked hundreds of these and froze them each year those are definitely my naka's recipe!!!!! she would make hundreds each year, they were among her specialities and i think i mentioned i really think she was a master baker among serbian women who are really mostly master bakers.

i've been to many slavas where people serve "sitni kolaci" that can't compare to these cookies.

Vanil Grancle
Yield: about 60 sandwich cookies

200 grams (1 cup minus one teaspoon) sugar
200 grams (1 stick + 6 tablespoons) butter at room temperature
1 whole egg + 3 separated eggs
1 tablespooon lemon rind, grated and minced
400 grams (2 1/3 cups) flour
1 heaping tablespoon sour cream
* * *
powdered sugar
about 2 cups walnuts, chopped into small bits
about 1/2 cup apricot jam

Forming the cookies

* Mix whole egg and three yolks with sugar.
* Mix in butter, sour cream and lemon rind.
* Add flour and mix to make a soft dough. If exceedingly soft and sticky, add a bit more flour.
* Shape dough into two logs. Wrap in parchment paper or plastic cling wrap and chill. Slice into 1/8" rounds.
* Alternately, shape dough into two or three disks that are 1/8" thick. Chill several hours on a platter, separating the layers with parchment paper or clear clingfoil so they don't get stuck together. Punch out with a cookie cutter into 1.5" rounds.
* Using a thimble, cut a hole into the center of half of the disks. If you don't have a thimble, use any cylinder into which your middle finger will just fit. I used a bit of copper piping.
* Re-roll any dough scraps left over and repeat as necessary until you've made all the dough into bottoms (solid rounds) and tops (rounds with holes).

Baking

* Bake cookie bottoms at 300 F. They should be pale when done, with just the lightest browning on the bottoms.
* Paint tops cookie tops with egg white. I did this by putting the egg white in a tray, and then placing all the tops in the tray.
* Sprinkle cookie tops with powdered sugar.
* Sprinkle cookie tops with walnuts.
* Bake cookie tops at 300 F. Like the bottoms, they'll be pale when they're done, just barely browned underneath.

Unfortunately, I didn't write down the baking times when I did this. Next time, I'll take notes and add it to this post. All I can say for now is, start checking your oven at 10 minutes. Go by sight and by the aroma of baking. When done, they will have puffed up a little. Like most baked cookies, they will feel a little underdone when they are perfectly done -- they continue to bake and dry out after you pull them from the oven -- but they'll have a light brown cast underneath, where they rest against the baking sheet.

I think the bottoms took 20 minutes and the tops 25.

Assembling

Let cool. Place about 1/4 teaspoon apricot jam on each cookie bottom. Top with the cookie top. Press and twist together just enough to distribute the jam evenly to the edge of the cookies. These will be squishy and slidey at first, but the jam will set up after a few hours and the sandwich construction will be sturdy.

Here's a tip I got from Cook's Illustrated: give your jam a quick whiz in the food processor. This will break up the big chunks of apricot and distribute the fruit more evenly throughout the jam, making it much easier to sandwich the cookies.

Now here's the original text of the recipe that my cousin sent me. Note that the non-metric amounts are different from those given above. I re-translated the metric into non-metric, and used what I came up with, rather than the non-metric amounts below. Also, instead of an entire lemon's zest, I used a tablespoon, after checking with my aunt that indeed this made sense. These are not exceedingly lemony cookies.

here is the granzle recipe. the ingredients are straight from naka's recipe as are the instructions on how to assemble the cookies but the directions on mixing ingredients come from my mother and me trying to make sense from how the ingredients would go together.

apparently naka never wrote down how she makes the cookie dough and mama never witnessed it or made the granzle herself. so here goes:

20 dkg (1 cup) sugar
20 dkg (1 cup) sweet butter (unsalted) 1 1/2 sticks
1 whole egg plus 3 eggs separated (small eggs would probably be most accurate)
lemon rind to taste (mama thinks about 1 whole medium lemon)
40 dkg flour (2 cups)
1 heaping tblspoon of sour cream
powdered sugar
chopped walnuts (small pieces)
apricot jam (sorry, no info on quantity for these last 3 items, we'll have to experiment)

combine 1 whole egg and 3 egg yolks and sugar. add softened butter and add sour cream and rind, combine.

add flour and if too soft, add some more. (i'm not kidding, that's what it says)

note --naka used to roll the dough out and cut out the shapes but mama says she does know that naka changed that technique because the dough was always so sticky. i think her solution sounds brilliant.---
form the dough into a long roll like a salami, wrap in plastic wrap and chill until hard. (no info on how long) dough should be like sugar cookie dough you buy at the grocery store---slice and bake---similar shape and thickness.

then, remove wrap and slice the dough into 60 disks. cut 30 of the disks with a hole in the center (these will be the tops) using a thimble. (mama fortunately remembers naka using a thimble, i thought i remembered the hole was pretty small, i love this kind of historic detail and thanks to you, i bothered to get it from mama finally!!!!)

bake the bottom 30 disks at 300 degrees until done (again, no details sorry) and cookies should be pale, not browned.

take the 3 egg whites, whisk with a fork and then paint tops (the disks with thimble hole)with egg whites. dip the tops into powdered sugar and chopped (small pieces) walnuts. then bake at 300 until done, again pale and not browned.

when cookies have cooled, assemble as sandwich cookies using apricot (we always had only apricot but of course any jam will do) jam.

my editorial comment is that i would sprinkle the cookies with powdered sugar and walnut pieces but you might want to dip.

Santa Claus is coming

2008-12-17T05:19:00.003-06:00

I never meant to raise my child to believe in Santa Claus. A fictional supernatural being who gets the credit for staging the gift-giving festivity when everyone knows perfectly well it's the parents who did the work. That it's the parents' love that makes it happen.

But it turns out my usual approach to teaching him about the world -- which might be summed up as a threefold exposing him to situations, things and opportunities, keeping him safe and staying out of the way of his process -- doesn't work the same with Santa Claus as it does with say, gravity or sharing.

The world of physics, his developing body, his energy and his inborn drive for self-preservation provided everything he needed to learn to climb the steps to the slide and come down it. It was easy to learn what leads to stumbling and a skinned knee. The world of interacting humans likewise provides plenty of feedback about what happens when two children covet a single toy. Eventually each toddler learns that snatching and running leads not to an unhampered relationship with the object of desire, but only to weeping, screeching and unhappiness all around.

Not so with Santa Claus. His image is all around all year -- you notice this when you have a young charge -- and especially as the autumn deepens into winter. He's featured on episodes of otherwise non-Christmassy TV shows. Often the plot of these episodes turns on the nullification of one character's disbelief. Or he's simply there, as real as any other fictional being in the show. He's around. He's iconic.

He's the guy who brings presents to children. And children do get presents, after all. For a four-year-old, this is not a controversial syllogism.

Anyway, I thought we shouldn't tell Ulysses that Santa Claus exists. Donald thought we should. As it turned out, it wasn't our decision to make. There was no point at which we would bestow or withhold this piece of information. (Technically, misinformation.) The world has taught Ulysses about the person of Santa Claus. The only real choice is between going with the flow and convincing him that it's all made up. That there's not really any such guy.

In other words, to be really, really mean.

So I'm going with the flow.

Santa Claus is about as real as Spongebob. But how real is Spongebob, for Ulysses? Does Ulysses realize that there is no pineapple under the sea? I want him to know that Steven Hillenberg's imagination is the true wonder of Spongebob. That Tom Kenny, Patrick Warburton, Clancy Brown -- to name just a few of that show's marvelous voice actors -- are among the legions of artists who create this pulsingly alive semblance. There's nothing to gain from trying to explain this to him now. Soon enough he'll know that these guys are made up of lots of little drawings shown in succession, synched with audio recordings made elsewhere. What does he understand now? I'm not sure. But I'm sure it would be futile, not to say hurtful, to dog him with the notion that "Spongebob is not real." Well, there he is. Interacting with a whole world of characters and things. Uttering quotable quotes that we quote in this household. Learning life lessons that we cite.

Every night for the past week or so, Ulysses has told me, in the dark of the evening and often as we're turning out the lights, "Santa Claus is coming tonight."

Each night, I say, "Santa Claus is coming soon. But not tonight."

And Ulysses answers, matching my tone in an exaggerated singsong: "Yes, tonight."

Glad we got that straight

2008-12-13T19:27:00.005-06:00

Apropos of nothing I could identify, Ulysses spoke up with this:

"Mama. Did you know there's a tooth fairy?"

"Why, yes," I answered, after the moment it took to gather my thoughts. "I did know that."

That was the conversation.

Meeting Santa

2008-12-06T17:54:00.007-06:00

Santa was at Walgreens, meeting children and posing for photos.

"Let's go for a ride," I told Ulysses after breakfast.

"Noooo. I'm not going for a ride," he replied.

"C'mon, we're gonna go out and see Santa Claus."

"Nooo, I'm not gonna go out and see San...." he trailed off, stopped and turned toward me. "I'm gonna go out and see Santa Claus!" he crowed.

Moments later I was helping him squirm into a full set of winter clothes. But when I brought out his boots, he said, "Nooo. I don't wanna wear boots. I want to wear my Thomas shoes."

His Thomas shoes are sneakers. The ground outside was mounded with the year's first thick snowfall.

"These boots will protect your feet from the snow," I said. "They'll keep your feet warm and dry. Your Thomas shoes aren't for this weather."

"Noooo. My Thomas shoes are magic. Boots are not magic."

"You know who wears black boots?" I asked. "Santa Claus."

"Boots! I'm wearing black boots! Mama, put these black boots ... on!"

* * *

At Walgreens, we caught sight of Santa and Ulysses stopped short, fell silent. His eyes widened. There he was, the great one. In person.

"Come on, Ulysses," I said, taking his hand and gently pulling him forward. I repeated again what I'd been telling him on the way over: "Santa's here to meet the children. He wants to talk with you and find out what you like. You can tell him what kinds of toys you like. Here are the cookies we're giving him. He brings us presents, so it's only right we bring him something, too."

Ulysses dragged behind me, following with slow little steps. Santa saw him and called over to him. "Hello, little boy! Do you want to sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas?"

I looked at Ulysses. His eyes shone, but at this suggestion his mouth changed from a little smile to a little "o" of astonishment. He shrank back. Santa smiled and greeted him again.

I watched as the two of them eyed one another across the stretch of glossy retail floor. Santa smiling gently; Ulysses as close to a swoon as I've ever seen him.

Then Ulysses seemed suddenly to become conscious of the zip-top sandwich bag of cookies that he was gripping with both hands. He drew himself up a little, and boldly stepped forward, all the way to Santa's chair. He held out the bag, his arms nearly straight before him.

"Here, Santa," he said in a soft voice. "I brought these cookies for you."

Magic/Not magic

2008-11-29T21:29:00.004-06:00

One day last week, I came home from work and Ulysses ran to the door to greet me. "We gotta make shoc'late ship cookies!" he said. "Go to cooking room, Mama. We gotta make shoc'late ship cookies."

So we did exactly that.

"Schoc'late chip cookies are magic," he told me. (A first for that word.)

So I guess he liked them.

Playing a racing video game another day, he told me, "I'm racing, Mama! Race cars are magic."

Also good.

This morning we were in the "cooking room" working out breakfast. I'd put the kaibosh on his request for a bowl of halved, frozen grapes, or anything else made entirely out of sugar. (Yes, I know it's fruit. Fruit made entirely out of sugar.) So what else, what else? "Would you like some bacon?" I tried.

"Nooooo."

"Would you like a sandwich?"

"Nooooo."

"How about a hot dog?"

He looked at me.

"Mama," he said, patiently, "Hot dogs are not magic."

Koljivo (Zito/Zhito)

2008-11-25T18:36:00.010-06:00

Koljivo, or Zito (pronounced ZHEE-toe, meaning "wheat"), is one of the most important dishes a Serbian can make. Loaded with the symbolism of life, death, harvest and renewal, it's presented at only a few special occasions: Slava, Bozic (BOH-zheech, or Christmas), and at funerals and memorials for the dead. More about koljivo on this blog here.

But if you don't happen to be Serbian, I suppose you could just make this as a delicious dessert.

To the American sensibility, it's extremely unusual, to say the least – a bowl of cooked, ground wheat fortified with ground nuts and sugar. Even the cooking instructions seem odd: Seven waters? Pillows and blankets?

The flavors, though, are straightforward, clean, accessible to the American palate, and easy to love.

Koljivo (Zito)

1 cup wheat berries (preferably white wheat, or psenica (pshenitsa) bela)
3 1/2 cups walnuts or pecans, or a combination of the two
2 cups powdered sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt

Garnish:
slivered almonds
whipped cream

Start this recipe the night before. There's an overnight step involved.

1. Seven waters
Place the wheat berries in a small pot or a large saucepan. Cover with water, about two inches above the level of the berries. The exact amount is unimportant. Bring to a rolling boil and let boil for a few seconds. Drain the water through a sieve and discard, keeping the berries in the pot.

Add new water to the wheat, the same amount as before. (I keep a kettle full of water brewing on another burner during the whole process to save time; I add the partially heated water from it and then refill the kettle from the tap.) Bring to a rolling boil. Drain.

Repeat until you've brought wheat and water to a boil seven times.

On the seventh water, add the salt. Don't drain the water.

2. Overnight soak
Place the pot of wheat on a blanket on your biggest, softest armchair or couch. I kid you not. Pack it all around with blankets and pillows. Leave overnight. Really. If you're watching Top Chef 5: New York, you'll know, from the very first episode, what happens when you try to cook wheat berries quickly. Imagine chewing on erasers. I'm telling you here what it takes to make wheat berries tender. And now you now why wheat is usually crushed into something else (flour, bulgar), and not served whole like rice.

Be sure your padded pot will be secure from wayward children or pets knocking it over.

3. Grinding
The next day, drain any water that hasn't been absorbed overnight.

Grind the wheat berries thoroughly in a food processor or a meat grinder. A blender could be problematic, but it could be done in small batches. Remove the wheat from the food processor bowl. Grind the nuts in the bowl. Add the sugar to the nuts and process together. Add the wheat back into the bowl and process together.

Spoon koljivo into a serving dish, preferably a clear glass one with straight sides.

Garnish by sticking slivered almonds all over the top, like a porcupine. I've been told that if and only if the koljivo is to commemorate the dead, the almond spikes should be placed in the shape of a cross. However, I've come upon photos on the Internet of Christmas koljivo decorated with a cross of almonds.

Serve by tablespoons in very small bowls, like custard cups, topped with a dollop of whipped cream.

Notes:
To find whole wheat berries, try the bulk section of a natural foods store.

I used a pressure cooker this year. I didn't bring the wheat to pressure; I just made use of the tight-fitting lid to boil the water faster and to ensure a secure lid overnight.

[Added 1/5/9, in response to Mia's comment.] This is not a recipe I got from my family. It's my own version of the one given it by a friend, a woman who lives here in Madison who moved to the U.S. in, I believe, the 1960s or 1970s. She described the method to me over the phone and I took notes.

Salt is my own addition. My friend did not mention salt. I find that grains, when prepared without salt, taste like ... like they need salt. So I added that eensy bit, 1/8th teaspoon. The end result tasted like it tasted just right, if you know what I mean. If you have good results with no salt at all, let me know.

The quantities I give above are not quite the way she gave them. She specified one cup of wheat berries. However, instead of specifying a quantity for the nuts and sugar, she just said to use equal volumes of wheat, nuts and sugar. That is (she said when I asked for clarification), equal to the volume of wheat after it's been cooked and ground. I figured it would be most useful to readers (and to me in the future) to know what that volume is, so that we know how much nuts and sugar to have on hand in order to make the recipe.

The wheat made 3 1/2 cups, so I used 3 1/2 cups of nuts. However, I remembered that, in the past, when I made her recipe using equal volumes of wheat, nuts and sugar, the final product was chokingly, achingly sweet. So sweet it interfered with enjoying the dish, for me. (And besides, who needs more sugar if less will work just as well?) So this time, I started with a cup of sugar and mixed it up, then added until it tasted just right to me. Very sweet, very nutty, very rich. But not cloying.

One more note on cooking the wheat this way. I've tried cooking whole wheat berries many times before, including under pressure and for several hours (I think I got up to four), and it always retained an unpleasantly springy chewiness. Even after grinding! This method, with the waters and the pillows and the overnight rest is the only method I know of that results in a pleasant, tender berry.

Slava 2008

2008-11-16T07:47:00.023-06:00

Yesterday we had a bunch of people over for my Krsna Slava, the Serbian family holiday to celebrate the patron saint, a custom that stretches back into prehistory and pre-Christian times, when the Serbs had family gods. As the story goes, they were reluctant to leave their family patron gods, so each family got a saint designated instead. Because this happened in the ninth century, the saints are all really ancient ones, like Saint Nicholas. My family's is a pair of twins, Saints Cosmas and Damian (Sveti Kuzman i Damian), born in Asia Minor (or Mesopotamia) to Saint Theodota.

The icon here is the exact picture that hung on my wall when I was a kid growing up. It's the current top-of-article image on the Wikipedia entry about them. In past years, I've seen other icons on the Wikipedia page and other pages that my Internet searches turned up. So it was a surprise, and gave me an unexpected eerie feeling, to see this very picture after so long.

More about Slavas past here:
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/search?q=slava

The custom in the Old Country is to have lots of people over all day, coming in and out, with lots of food. I never experienced that, because we didn't live in a place with a big Serb community, but it sounds like fun, so that's what I went for yesterday. Also a priest comes over and blesses the home, but of course we didn't do that, either. We did invite a Universalist Unitarian minister -- as a guest, not in an official capacity -- but he didn't show.

For many years, Don and I would just go out to dinner on my Krsna Slava, November 14. Somehow we always seemed to wind up at a Mexican place -- Pasqual's or Pedro's or Laredo's -- so that we started feeling like the Slava custom was to go out for Mexican food. Once we went to a wonderful Laotian place, Lao Laan Xang, with our friends Sigurd and Gloria -- that must have been 1999 or 2000, because it was the year I wrote about them for the Isthmus dining guide. I'm not sure what inspired me to start celebrating at home and experimenting with Serbian food instead. A few years back, we began inviting our friend Gigi, who's become our Serbian holiday co-celebrant. This year, for the first time, I decided to do something closer to the real thing and invite a whole bunch of people, as many as I dared invite to our small space and cook for all at once. It worked out great and gave me confidence to expand the guest list even more next time around. Sigurd and Gloria were there, the Dutch and Spanish mathematicians we befriended almost immediately after moving to Madison, as well as their kids, Nico (now 14) and Vicky (now 9). Also our neighbor Jayne, from across the street (we offered to give her a ride) and our friend Jennifer. Later my co-worker Jill came, along with her partner Mary. Finally my former co-worker Gil, from Israel, showed up. He was lost in the mobile home park, so I directed him over the phone, and went out into the street and waved him into a spot before running back into the house -- I was barefoot and chilly. Somehow he couldn't figure out which house was ours in the dark, though, and after we waited minutes for him, some folks went outdoors to find him, wandering around the street trying to find the house. Yeah, I know, I don't get it either. Sorry, Gil. (Unfortunately, Gigi, who loves sharing Slava with us, couldn't come at the last minute -- her father had to get emergency eye surgery. We're still waiting to hear how that turned out, and of course we hope for the best.)

Well, I must say I am proud of myself for pulling this thing off. I planned all week, stayed up late cooking and prepping Friday and got up early and got cooking Saturday. It turned out to be the most tactically succesful of all the fun food parties I've thrown over the years. By that I mean: when the first guests started showing up, I had already changed out of my pajamas. And showered. And had completed enough of the cooking that I was actually able to enjoy the party! Here's what we had.

Slatko
Traditionally, whole fruit preserves, extremely sweet. Served in a jar, presented on a tray alongside several cups of cold water and a pile of dessert spoons. Each guest, on arrival, eats a single spoonful of slatko and chases it with water. The slatko I made for this occasion was apricot jam and honey. Someday I'll try to make my own from scratch. Maybe. Canning still intimidates me.

Kolach
One of the central, sacred dishes that must be on every Slava table. This tall, round loaf can be regarded either as a tremendously rich, cake-like bread, or the breadiest, most un-sweet pound cake you've ever had. The word means "cake" in Serbian (and just about any other Slavic language, too). The recipe is passed matrilineally through the generations, just as the Slava saint is passed patrilinealy. I like the way that sort of balances things out. And the crisscrossing, continuous invigoration of the family tradition it makes for. My recipe comes from my mother (b. 1920), who had been Nada (Nadezhda) Jankovic. and from her mother (b. 1888), who had been Ljubitsa Stephanovic, and from her mother, who had been Radivojevic, and from her mother, who had been Bojic. So you see that it is a very old recipe, because this lineage is only the beginning. The recipe is posted here:
http://vesnaswriting.blogspot.com/2009/01/serbian-christmas.html

This year I incorporated the famous no-knead bread technique that swept the foodie blogosphere after Mark Bittman's 2006 New York Times column came out here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/08mini.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html

and by gum if it didn't work just fine. In a big crockery bowl, I mixed up the usual Kolach ingredients on Friday night. They came out wet and sticky -- depending on the weather, you have to add milk or add flour to get the dough to the right consistency for kneading. In this case, I left if just as it was, and covered the bowl with clingfoil. In the morning, it had risen perfectly, with bubbles on top and all. I added a bit of flour and folded it over and over a few times. Then I put it in a well-buttered crockpot liner, covered it with its glass lid, and let it rest and rise for a couple of hours. After that I baked it in the oven as usual -- 400 uncovered for 10 minutes, then 350 covered with the crockpot lid for an hour. Perfect results, most of the work done overnight, and the oven freed up early on for all the other stuff that needed to go into it.

I sure wish I had two ovens. Or three.

Koljivo (Zito) (KOHL-yee-voh, ZHEE-toh)
This is another sacred dish, and one of the three elements de rigueur on a Slava table. (The third is a white candlestick ablaze.) (A fourth element needed in the room would be an icon of the saint or saints whose day it is.) It's made only for three occasions: Slava, Christmas, and for a funeral or requiem. My friend, an elderly Serbian woman in Madison I'll call Sophy S., tells me that only for the commemorating the dead is it decorated with slivered almonds arranged in the shape of a double cross. For Slava and Christmas (Bozic), it's decorated with slivered almonds stuck all over like a porcupine. However, searching for info about Koljivo on the Internets on Friday night, I came upon a picture of Slava Koljivo that was decorated with a cross.

So what is it? Essentially, boiled, then ground, wheat berries. The symbolism is powerful, especially when it's made for the dead, for what is death but the ultimate harvest? So saith the Reaperman. The wheat is mixed with ground nuts and powdered sugar. It's sweet and incredibly rich, so a tablespoon of this is a hearty serving. No kidding. Top it with whipped cream. You don't serve this for dessert; you eat it before the meal. Remember, just a tablespoon, or less. Save room for dinner.

Koljivo recipe in a separate post.

Gibanica (GHEE-bah-Neet-sah)
Call it Serbian cheese bread, call it savory cheese pie or strudel, call it flaky cheese casserole -- there's no ready American analog for this room-temp wedge of cheesy, flaky goodness, one of the most typical of all typically Serbian dishes. Read about it in this previous post:
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2007/11/gibanica-flaky-savory-cheese-pie.html

The big discovery I made this year was to use only 3/4 of the package of filo, instead of the whole pound. For the first time, my giba was puffy on coming out of the oven, as recipes suggested it would be. Best yet, with the dough-to-cheese ratio more favorable, the result was way more cheeeesy. That's a good thing.

Djuvec (JEW-vech)
Ah, djuvec. That wonderful one-pot meal. Pork and/or beef with veg, cooked long and slow in a big pot with just enough rice to soak up the juices that exude from the eggplant, tomato, celery, parsely, onion and meat herein. I've written it up before:
http://vesnavuynovich.blogspot.com/2006/11/slava-with-friend-and-djuvec-recipe.html

This year I made it with equal parts pork shoulder and beef shoulder (I'm guessing that's another name for chuck, don't know why they called it that at the UW Provision Store where we buy in bulk to load up the standalone freezer we splurged on this summer); previously I'd used all pork. Also I upped the rice to 1/2 cup, but I think it could have taken more. The rice sort of disapperd amidst all the rest. Used a new (to me) rice this year, also: an organic variety grown by Lundberg but packaged and sold for Asian-American markets.

Pogaca (POH-gah-cha)
I made a "Farmer's Pogaca," a recipe adapted from the 1963 "Yugoslav Cookbook" printed by the state. Of course, in 1963, just about everything in Yugoslavia was done by the state, as it was a comprehensively socialist economy. Everything from the Zastava factory, where Yugos were made, to most larger restaurants were owned and run by the state. When I traveled there in 1989 I learned quickly to avoid those restaurants. They had the ambiance of, say, a DMV here in the states. Can you imagine the charm of ordering a meal from the person behind the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles? Asking them the difference between the shopska salata and a Srpska salata listed on the salad page? That was pretty much the flavor of the interpersonal transactions at such places. Small, privately run inns and cafes were the place to go for a warm, southern Slav experience. And good food more redolent of tradition than of institution.

Pogaca is bread, and it can be as plain and dressed down as kolach is rich and resplendent. Usually it's a yeasted flatbread, round and meant to be broken, not cut. There are many versions, including bogota pogaca, meaning "rich pogaca," with extra special ingredients like buttermilk and egg yolks, that's flaky and folded, sort of like croissant.

This "farmer's flatbread," though, is just flour, water, yeast, salt and oil. Easy, quick, and a great side to a hearty meal. The recipe makes three 10-inch pogace.

Farmer's Pogaca recipe
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 teaspoon yeast
6-8 cups flour ( I used 2 cups whole wheat and the rest AP)
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup olive oil or other fat
Beaten egg (for brushing over top)

Dissolve yeast in warm water. Add remaining ingredients. Mix to a medium dough. Knead for 5 minutes. Let rest 15 minutes. Divide in thirds. Roll to size and shape of layer cake pans. Lightly grease the pans. Place dough inside. Brush dough with beaten egg. Dock (prick all over with a fork.) Bake 20–25 minutes at 425, or until golden brown and done. Serve hot, or whenever.

I forgot to dock and brush with egg yesterday. I learned from this that the docking keeps weird bubbles from misshaping these.

I used these for dipping the ajvar, which is the next speciality on the menu.

Ajvar (AYE-var)
Also known as eggplant caviar or sweet red pepper relish, this can be made with either or a combination of these as the main ingredient. The word is etymologically related to "caviar," so I'm supposing the eggplant version came first. However, on Serbian tables I've usually seen it as mostly or all pepper.

I've heard that it can be spicy hot or not, but I've only encountered it non-spicy in person.

Srpski Ayvar recipe
1-2 eggplants
1 red bell pepper
5-6 cloves garlic, still in their peels
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespooon paprika
fresh lemon juice to taste -- a teaspoon or two.

Place the eggplants, pepper and garlic on a shallow baking sheet -- for instance, a cookie sheet -- and roast at 350 for 1–2 hours, until the eggplants have totally collapsed. The bell pepper and the garlic will certainly be done and need to come out of the over after an hour; the eggplant might take an hour or so longer. Every fifteen or twenty minutes or so, turn everything over so that as much surface as possible spends some time in contact with the cookie sheet.

If you make this in the summer, you can grill instead of roast the veg, and get a wonderful smoky aroma in the bargain.

Remove from oven and let cool. Placing the veg in a brown paper bag will make the peeling go easier.

When your veg is cool, peel 'em all. Discard the seeds and core of the pepper as well as its peel.

Process all this in a food processor, adding the oil, salt and pepper. Add lemon to taste. Serve as a dip.

I just realized I forgot the paprika. So much for all that tactical success, I guess. Well, I suppose that means the paprika is optional, because that ajvar was pretty darn tasty.

Snezani Jabuke (SNE-zhah-nee JAH-boo-keh)
Literally, snowy apples. OK, the Yugoslav Cookbook (1963) just calls this "Baked Applesauce." But what's the fun of that?

Deep into the evening, I said I was going to make dessert. Don looked like he was going to fall over on hearing that -- everyone was pretty well stuffed by that point. However, I was determined. That Kolach uses egg yolks only, and I had noticed this recipe the night before -- it uses egg whites. Finally, something to do with all those egg whites I can't bear to throw out and therefore collect in a seal-top plastic bowl and keep in the refrigerator for several days until it goes bad and I throw it out later!

Vicky peeled and sliced the apples for this, using the Peel-Away gadget that I and all kids love so well. Ulysses calls it the Apple Robot. After we got this into the oven, Ulysses brought out another apple from the crisper and peeled and ate it right on the robot, one crank at a time.

Snezani Jabuke recipe
2 pounds apples (about 8 apples -- exactitude is not necessary here)
2 egg whites (or however many you have on hand)
1/4 cup sugar

Peel, core and slice apples. Place in a saucepan with a few tablespoons or so of water (just enough to keep from scorching) and cook at medium-low heat until soft.

Turn apples into a buttered pie plate or casserole dish.

Beat egg whites stiff, adding sugar partway through. Spread on top of apples, making pretty peaks with your spatula.

Bake at 400 about 20 minutes, until golden brown.

Spoon into custard cups or any little dessert dishes. Serve hot or cold.

You may notice this is not applesauce. The Yugoslav Cookbook had involved instructions for rubbing and grinding and grating the apples into applesauce before turning them into the dish. But I thought, what for? As it stands, this is sort of like a crustless apple meringue pie. And about as fast as a baked dessert can get -- especially if you have an Apple Robot on your side.

Srpska Kafa, Slivovitz (Serbian coffee, plum brandy)

These would have been great, but I forgot to bring 'em out. OK, I said most tactically successful so far. Not perfect!

Found a new word

2008-11-10T09:01:00.003-06:00

I came across this word today. The definition is from the Dictionary app that comes with the Mac OS.

narratology |ˌnarəˈtäləjē| noun the branch of knowledge or literary criticism that deals with the structure and function of narrative and its themes, conventions, and symbols. DERIVATIVES narratological |ˌnarətlˈäjikəl| adjective narratologist |-jist| noun

Carlo Ginzburg, in his interview on the 11/3/08 Open Source podcast on microhistory, uses the word "narratologist." That led me to look it up to see what it meant, exactly.

I had one of those, "Yes! That's what I like! That's what I want to find out about!" moments. It's a concept that excites and inspires me. Sounds like it could include Joseph Campbell "The Power of Myth" type stuff. Like elements that my favorite movie, TV and book reviews and discussion revolve around: the structure and meaning of story. Thus my new intention to look it up and find out more about it. Can't wait to get to it!

Unreasonable patient, or cranky doctor?

2008-10-18T09:00:00.006-05:00

About a year ago, I posted a comment on a NY Times blog, in reference to a flurry of dispute about a doctor's column in Time magazine that had just appeared.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine suffered an injury in a bike accident and has been struggling to get reasonable diagnosis and treatment since. When she told me about how she feels she's been learning more about her case from the Internet than some of the professionals she's been talking to seem to know, I remembered the exchange from last November.

Rereading my comment, I thought it might be good to bring it out of mothballs and put it out here in the fresh air. A set of links to the articles in question follow my comment. A few remarks also follow.

I made a couple of changes to my original comment, They appear in square brackets.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/a-doctors-disdain-for-medical-googlers/?apage=11#comment-8733

Dr. Haig reveals himself to be sexist, stereotyping, narrow-minded and dishonest. “Susan” was better off crossing him off her list, even if if he hadn’t lied about his ability to treat her. In fact, my greatest criticism of her would be that, despite all the research she’d done, she[ gave ]him a visit.

Here’s what Dr. Haig says he believes:

- Patients who ask too many questions are “brainsuckers.”

- (Some?) patients who ask no questions are “Bozos.”

- Nurses are good patients because they trust him and laugh at his jokes. (My guess: they’re skilled at sucking up to arrogant doctors like Haig.)

- Engineers are good patients because they don’t challenge the narrow paradigm of, for instance, a mechanistically minded orthopedist who is proud of “know[ing] what to ignore” — like the possible contribution of dietary mineral deficiency to joint pain. (That’s one of Haig’s examples of Stupid Questions Engineers Don’t Ask.)

Maybe Haig described “Susan” and her manner fairly accurately. But maybe he was way, way off.

Here are some things I wonder.

- Why does he even mention the fact that Susan is, to his mind, “attractive”?

- Why assume “Susan” did all her research via Google.com, or the Internet, for that matter? For all we know, she went to the library and hit books.

- Why assume “Susan” knew his street address? She mentioned a highway exit that she assumed to be on his route home. For all we know, she only knows his home’s neighborhood, or town, or even simply its general direction from his Scarsdale office.

- Is it possible that “Susan” can’t afford childcare? For instance, her household income might be — like ours — too much for state-subsidized daycare, but not enough for nannies or preschool or even the occasional babysitter. She needs to see doctors. Where can the child go during her appointments? The lobby?

- Did he exaggerate the child’s misbehavior? For example, did he really investigate and confirm that “Junior”’s sippy cup contained chocolate milk? Is it possible that he just guessed something dark and stainy for rhetorical purposes? And that the cup contained, maybe, water?

- “…ripped up my magazines…” I wonder if the child was paging through some magazines (possibly already tattered and older than the child himself), and tore a page or two, through youthful clumsiness.

- I wonder if the child might have spilled a couple of crackers or Cheerios, and (with a three-year-old’s level of dexterity), accidentally stepped on one or two while trying to pick them up?

- The child was “screeching”? Maybe. We have only Dr. Haig’s questionable account. Regardless, what parenting technique would he have preferred to her reasonably toned admonitions? Shouting? Swearing? Threatening? Spanking? I have news for Dr. Haig. When an active, curious, high-energy three-year-old is on a tear, nothing short of a tranquilizer dart can quiet him or her down.

Any parent of such a child who’s had to wait with them in a tiny space filled with dangerous, fragile items — like a doctor’s office, cooped up 45 minutes waiting for a 5-minute doctor’s appointment, as I’ve done — can tell you how difficult a situation it is. I wonder how long “Susan” and child waited for Dr. Haig.

- Haig complains he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I wonder. Maybe he’s one of those doctors who doesn’t let you finish your question before charging off with a long, not-quite-pertinent response. In those situations, the you have two options: let the appointment time slip away until the doctor rushes off, leaving your questions unanswered and your symptoms incompletely described, or interrupt — at the risk of being described like “Susan”.

- Finally, I wonder how accurate was his diagnosis. In his essay, Haig tells us he lets his mind wander while “brainsuckers” ramble. At the online directory healthgrades.com, [individual doctors are rated on a variety of points. For Dr. Haig,] the “Average User Response” to the question “Does the physician listen to you and answer your questions?” is listed as “2 / 5 (Mostly not).”

— VesnaVK

"When the patient is a Googler" by Scott Haig
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1681838,00.html?imw=Y

Then this NY Times commentary on the Time essay. My comment is #254.
"A doctor's disdain for medical Googlers"
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/a-doctors-disdain-for-medical-googlers/

As a bonus, you can also read this one:
"Time magazine's Scott Haig proves that patients need to be Googlers"
http://thyroid.about.com/b/2007/11/13/time-magazines-dr-scott-haig-proves-that-patients-need-to-be-googlers.htm

By the way, I don't think there's anything deficient in using only the Internet for that kind of research. I don't even think there's anything inferior about using Google as one's only search tool. I just was annoyed that this Haig guy was so certain that he knew that's what "Susan" had done. Also that so many people assumed he was correct.

What annoyed me most, I think, was that nearly everyone took his description of the woman and her child at face value: the woman was rude and/or a kook; the child was a brat. Hardly anyone doubted it, no matter what they thought of the rest of what he was saying. Maybe that shows how much authority people give doctors, even as they're disagreeing with them? Or maybe it shows how much authority people give whatever they see published. And this guy gets a column in Time magazine!

Other commenters made huge leaps to things that weren't even implied by what the doc said in the article. One MD said confidently that the woman was a "somatizer," someone who is obsessed with their body and invents or imagines all kinds of symptoms. There's nothing in the article to point to that. Not even jerky Dr. Haig said anything like that. Haig said he knew what her problem was and how to treat it. Haig implied that she was visiting a lot of doctors for that problem, but not that she went to a lot of doctors for a lot of problems.

Now taste!

2008-09-10T07:42:00.001-05:00

Ratatouille has become le film du jour.

There's a running bit in the movie that involves tasting one thing -- bread, perhaps -- and then another -- cheese, perhaps. With each nibble, animation appears, showing the character's experience of the taste. Then the character eats both at the same time, and there's a burst of more complex animation that incorporates both the earlier bits. Whole is greater than sum, and all that.

OK.

Ulysses and I were sitting on the couch with a plate of cucumber slices, one of his favorite treats. I was watching I don't know what, Countdown with Keith Olberman or something. Suddenly a slice of cucumber was thrust between my teeth. Obediently, I bit into it.

"No, don't hork it down!" said Ulysses, snatching away the cucumber. He was echoing Remy (Ratatouille's central character) trying to educate his rat brother Emil's palate with the line, "No, don't just fork it down! Really taste it!"

The slice reappeared. I took a delicate nibble.

"Yes!" cried Ulysses. "Taste it."

He took the slice away. Then he put it back between my teeth. "Now," he said, "taste this." I nibbled again.

Now he was gleeful, playing up the denoument. He pushed what was left of the cucumber slice into my mouth and crowed, drawing out the first word, "Now taste it!"

Then, stern for a verdict: "Well?"

Number One!

2008-09-09T08:24:00.005-05:00

Ulysses still hasn't quite gotten the hang of that classic form of adult-child interaction, the "How old are you?" conversation. And I think I finally got a clue as to why: it turned on his interpretation of what the whole conversation is about.

Adults used to ask me how old he was, and I would answer. Then, as he got a little bigger, they began to ask him, instead. Knowing he wouldn't, I would answer for him: "Two," and later, "Three." I began waiting for him, giving him a chance to respond for himself, but eventually I would be the one to supply the answer.

I've been trying to teach him, or at least to rehearse it enough that the answer will come automatically, but always, he either ignores me or looks at me skeptically.

"How old are you, Ulysses? You're four! When someone asks you how old you are, you can say, 'Four." Say, 'I'm four.' 'I'm four.' How old are you, Ulysses?"

Silence.

"How old are you?"

"No."

Sigh.

So earlier this week at a reception -- it was the campaign victory party for Kelda Helen Roys on the evening of the election for State Assembly, held at a local restaurant -- when we struck up a conversation with a woman there, I wasn't surprised when Ulysses answered her, "How old are you?" with his usual friendly, smiling silence.

"How old are you?" she repeated, adding helpfully, "Are you four? Or five?"

"No," he said, firmly. Then, raising aloft his index finger so that his chest puffed out a little, he announced, "I'm Number One!"

The Cooking Show

2008-09-04T07:02:00.001-05:00

Next day, Ulysses decided he did want to watch Ratatouille after all. Now it's replaced Cars as the most frequently watched movie in the house. He calls it "The Cooking Show."

I haven't seen the whole thing yet, but enough to discover -- as he somehow knew but I didn't -- that the sentiment "I don't want to eat garbage" is a major driving plot point in the movie.

And I thought he was just being surreal.

U: "I don't want to eat garbage"

2008-09-01T14:17:00.001-05:00

As the 38,647th showing of Pixar's excellent Cars was loading up in the DVD player, I thought I might divert Ulysses's attention to Ratatouille, another Pixar instant classic, and a movie I've been dying to see.

U was enjoying the preview of Ratatouille that played on the Cars disc, so I dug out the other movie and presented it.

"Look, Ulysses! Do you want to watch the movie about the rat who becomes a chef?"

He looked at the disc case in my hand.

"No!" he exclaimed. "I don't want to eat garbage."

Rock on

2008-07-29T10:00:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was the first time Ulysses asked me if I was ready to rock.

He was playing The Sims, which he learned to play yesterday. When I came home for lunch, he was watching Donald play on Don's computer and fumbling a bit with the mouse himself.

By the time I came home after work, Don had installed the game on U's computer, and he was building rooms, buying multiple clean-up robots and cooking grills, and had jukeboxes lined up in the backyard.

He pointed Betty Newbie to the boom box in a room with a pink and a green couch and directed her to turn it on and dance. To me, he said, "Mama! Are you ready to rock?"

More on Multatuli

2008-07-16T19:27:00.004-05:00

Branshea's comment to my last post piqued my interest in Multatuli even more.

I found this site devoted to him:

http://www.multatuli-museum.nl/en/

To read it in Dutch, take the /en/ off the end of the URL. And then of course there's always the Wikipedia entry.

I found the duck eggs quote here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tnZTYuvdijsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=oyster+eagle&ei=y5B-SLX3GYLGjgHc0KC_CA&sig=ACfU3U0hutAr0gapygsroUQVth6Ald2zmw#PPA21,M1
in a "limited preview" online of "The Oyster and the Eagle: Selected Aphorisms and Parables of Multatuli" by E.M. Beekman, 1974.

It can be found on page 102, listed as No. 852.

Presumably Beekman selected the quote from some other Multatuli source material, but I can't identify it from the online preview.

Reading through the pages available for preview on the Google Books site, I was instantly fascinated and drawn to this figure. He's irreverent, forthright, dry, darkly humorous. A writer who belongs in the company of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken.

Right away I found another comment about parenting, although the aphorisms are mostly about all sorts of other things. This is on Page 49.

A mother who does not have nourishing milk is to be pitied.

A mother who does have nourishing milk and forces it back into her disappointed glands, robbing her child, is criminal.

Wow. That sure beats the heck out of the modern pussyfooting so common around this issue. I get angry every time I hear or read the suggestion that "this decision is a very personal one," cast as an answer to the question of whether or not to breastfeed.

I hate that "personal decision" garbage. Well, of course it's personal. Very personal. No duh. What do I need anyone to tell me that for? It's as if the writer, or organization, putting forth the statement imagines they're bequeathing on me the right to think through and ultimately make that decision for myself. I have that right already; I already know about that right; to suggest otherwise is downright insulting.

Beyond that, the statement is devoid of useful content. It's really just a cop-out, a way for parenting-related books and articles to sound wise and encompassing, while backing away from taking a stand.

In effect, "it's a very personal decision" translates to, "It doesn't matter either way." But it does matter. It's a huge deal, for nutrition, for normal human development: emotional, social, psychological. Sure, many babies can grow up happy and healthy enough without mother's milk and the comfort of mother's breast. But why should they have to?

Eggs in the water

2008-07-16T06:37:00.007-05:00

I came across this fantastic quote this morning. It was in my A.Word.A.Day e-mail.

One does not advance the swimming abilities of ducks by throwing the eggs in the water.

-Multatuli (pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker), novelist (1820-1887)

I never heard of this guy, but now I have to look him up.

This expresses beautifully my quarrel with those who say that infants should sleep alone in their own rooms with the door shut so that they can learn independence. That they should be left to "cry it out" so that they can develop self-reliance. That every child should be steeped daily in an environment of toxic peers and authority figures (instead of, say, homeschooling for individuals better suited to that) so that they can learn resilience and other advanced social skills.

And a hundred other different ways that people push babies and children into overwhelming situations they aren't prepared to manage, on the theory that this itself will give them that preparation. That waiting until a child is strong and ready is no more than unhealthy, effetizing coddling.

His name was Robert Paulson...

2008-07-07T09:12:00.003-05:00

(If you're a fan of the movie Fight Club, the headline will make sense.)

Ulysses's relationship to language continues to evolve. His interest in words and naming and syntax has become more directed, more active and intent.

Sometimes he repeats our phrases in a whisper, as if studying them for meaning. As if meditating on them, opening himself to receive their secrets.

Last weekend I offered him an apple and he accepted, following me to the kitchen -- the "cooking room," as he calls it these days. I fetched an apple from the refrigerator crisper, saying, "This is a Pink Lady."

He frowned, looking at the apple. "That's not Pink Lady," he said, correcting me. "That's a apple."

"Yes," I said, washing it under the faucet. "This is an apple. It's a Pink Lady apple."

He watched as I brought out the corer, a sharp, serrated cylinder of stainless steel on a bright red handle with a picture of red apples set into it, and drove it into the apple.

"That apple not pink," he said. "That apple red."

I looked at the apple. True enough. You could call it pink as far as apples go, but as far as pink goes, it was red.

"Yes, this apple is red," I said. "This apple's name is Pink Lady."

Ulysses whispered: "This apple's name is Pink Lady. This apple is red. This apple's name is Pink Lady. This apple is red. This apple's name is Pink Lady."

Why don't you make like a banana and...

2008-05-29T20:38:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was beautiful and warm. The days get long early in the year this far north, and it was still bright and blue when Ulysses and I walked off the park playground around quarter to eight. We crossed the street to Culver's, a locally based chain of frozen custard and burger joints.

Ulysses's eyes lit up at the sight of the carpeted dining room with padded banquette seats and chairs, the busy counter. The place was humming with couples and families enjoying that great Culver's fare.

I ordered a cup of turtle, the flavor of the day -- they mix each serving by hand when you place your order -- and filled a plastic cup with ice cubes and water at the soda fountain. We sat down at a little table. Ulysses was contented to sip water, and I ate the entire dessert myself (oops). The pecans were crisp and fresh, with just enough salt to set off the milky sweet caramel. The custard was creamy and rich. Ulysses looked around at the busy dining room, the counter staff carrying trays of hot onion rings, fried fish, Culver's famous butter burgers and more to the eager customers.

He looked at me. "What a great party!" he said.

Then Ulysses noticed the cut-glass salt and pepper shakers on the table. He shook some of each into his water. Then he shook in a little more. Then a lot more. After a few shakes, I tried to call a halt to the seasoning project. He resisted -- loudly. I had some choices: leave, continue to forbid the salting, or lift the salting ban. After a few loud minutes, I decided to go with the last. What the heck, I reasoned, what's so bad about what he was doing, really? How much could a shakerfull of salt cost the restaurant -- it's not that outrageous to help ourselves to that much condiment. Probably it's comparable to the cost of a few packets of ketchup, I figured, which no one would begrudge us, after all. And it would be easy enough for me to clean up when we left.

(Yes, I backed down to the demands of a four-year-old. So sue me.)

Finally Ulysses was satisfied with the seasoning in his water. He slowly lifted the cup to his lips. I kept my face straight, ready to suppress the laughter I knew would come when I saw him squinch up his face in disgust at his saline creation.

He sipped. He smiled. Then he swigged.

"Mmmm!" he said. "Yummy! Delicious! You try, Mama!" And he passed the cup across the table to me.

I sipped, and nearly choked. I thought it would be really salty, but I hadn't counted on how potent all that pepper would be. Plus, his enthusiasm was so great that I had been sort of hypnotized into thinking that, somehow, it would actually be tasty. It wasn't.

I passed the cup back to the chef, and he continued salting and peppering -- and drinking -- until the salt shaker was empty. The ice cubes and much of the water had frozen into a solid mass on which lay a thick, dusty coat of pepper.

"Can I have some ice cream?" said Ulysses, sweetly.

About a tablespoon remained of the custard I'd bought for us to share. I gave him a spoonful, and then had another bite myself. It tasted strongly of pepper -- that his lips had left on the shared spoon. And then it was gone.

"Ice cream?" he asked.

Well, I did promise him ice cream. It wasn't his fault that I bought it twenty minutes before he wanted to eat it, and then ate it myself. We went back to the counter and bought a small vanilla cone.

Back at the table, Ulysses jumped up after only a few licks at his cone. "I know!" he said, and ran back to the ordering area. I caught up with him to find him talking to the tall young man behind the counter.

"A banana split, please," he said.

"Our banana splits are bigger than him!" exclaimed the young man.

"I don't even know how he even knows about banana splits," I said to him, and then, to Ulysses, I fibbed: "I don't think they have banana splits here."

"Hmmm," he answered, and looked thoughtful.

"Let's go back to our car and go home," I suggested.

"OK!" he chirruped. There was still plenty of cone left for him to show off to Donald by the time we were home.

What if everyone went low-carb and cooked from scratch?

2008-05-04T19:54:00.005-05:00

Here's something I posted on Low Carb Friends today. Someone wrote, a bit tongue in cheek, that if everyone quit buying processed, industrialized food -- junk, that is -- the result would be the "[c]omplete collapse of the nation's economy and the end of the world as we know it."

I don't find that idea terribly farfetched, and I wrote this about it:

Economy is based on commerce, which is the exchange of goods, which is only possible when there is a storeable surplus, which is made possible by agriculture, which always begins with the cultivation of storable starch crops and quickly leads to hoarding and the development of hierarchy -- including wealth and poverty, bosses and underlings.

This is why Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel has said that the development of agriculture might be the worst mistake in human history. A tremendous book for looking at starch foods through the lens of history, by the way.

The end of starch- and sugar-based living would indeed be the end of today's economy as we know it. It would be a transformation -- possibly a collapse, if it weren't properly managed -- more profound than I think most people realized.

If that were coupled with most people eating mostly whole foods (that is, cooking everything from scratch ingredients), growing a good portion of their own vegetables and raising their own chickens for meat and eggs -- entirely possible (theoretically) for nearly everyone -- the impact would be devastating for a huge portion of modern industry.

I just read an article (in the NY Times, I think) that said England exports 15,000 pounds of waffles annually, and also imports 15,000 pounds of waffles annually. The writer was making the point that a lot of food importing and exporting amounts to a waste of fuel and other transport costs. I noticed a larger point: nobody needs to buy a waffle. I don't mean no one needs to eat the starch; I mean waffles are easy and cheap to make from scratch.

Are you an artist?

2008-04-29T20:15:00.001-05:00

Ulysses and I were at the grassy playground near our house, and some neighborhood kids were there as well. The other big kids were out of earshot when a boy just in his early teens turned towards me.

"Are you an artist?" he asked.

I thought a moment before I said, "Yes. I'm a writer. I'm not a visual artist."

He smiled. "I knew it. I'm an ... inspiring artist." He looked quickly towards the other kids calling out to one another as they climbed along the swing, the slide, the lower branches of one of the pair of maple trees on the green slope, then he turned back to me. "I could tell," he said with a conspiratorial pride that lifted his chin as he spoke. He motioned towards my beret with a flick of his eyes. "Because of the hat."

The announcer

2008-03-27T07:09:00.013-05:00

"Get going," came the voice from behind me.

"What?" I said, startled. I was settling into the driver's seat of our minivan after buckling Ulysses into his child's seat, and gathering up from the floor the orange knit gloves he'd peeled off his hands. We had just spent a pleasant hour at the playground of Berkley Park, our first outdoor excursion since Wisconsin entered its harshest winter on record several months ago.

It was different from our last playground visit. I'd taken along my iPod, but I never plugged into my usual podcasts, because instead of mostly silence and squeals, Ulysses carried on nonstop conversation. "Up, Mama, up! I up. You up. Sit down! Slide!" We sat side by side atop the pair of straight slides. "Ready, set, go! We did it! We won! Come on, Mama, let's go again. Let's slide! No, Mama, that's not your seat, that's my seat. That's your side. Mama! OK. One, two, three -- yippee!"

It was close to 7 when a chill wind picked up against the fading sunlight. "Wind," said Ulysses, and he reached around behind his head to tug at the collar of his jean jacket. He pulled up, trying to loop it over the top of his head.

"Mama, help me," he said.

"That coat doesn't have a hood," I said.

It was the first time in several months he'd been outdoors without his sturdy, hooded overcoat -- a good ninth, at least, of his total time on Earth so far. By now a jacket with no hood must be an untenable proposition, I thought as he continued to tug

"Mama! Help me!" he said, now agitated. His words were crumbling into a cry. "No hood! No hood! Aggh!"

Or maybe he was simply cold, I realized, suddenly. I whipped off my beret and fitted it over his blue denim ball cap, tucking it down against the back of his neck.

"How's that?" I asked.

"Hood!" he said, happily. I sunk my head a little deeper into my jacket and watched him run towards the climbing rungs.

"Look, a swing! A bridge! Run on bridge, Mama! I'm gonna get you! OK, that's enough. Green car. Come on. Come on, Mama, come on!"

Now, in the warm van, the voice came from behind me with the even-toned authority of a public announcement. "Get going," it repeated.

I turned the key in the ignition.

"You're doing great!" said the voice.

I suddenly felt I was a character in a kids' video game who had accomplished some goal -- frosting the cupcake rolling by on the conveyor belt, or saving the emperor penguin. Had I really turned the key, or had I just clicked on it?

As I rolled the van from the parking spot, the announcer chimed in again, as stentorian as a tone could be in the octave above high C:

"That's awesome!"

A Dora Ball?

2008-03-16T14:18:00.001-05:00

Ulysses and I were bouncing a play ball to one another across the kitchen floor. I was overcome by the sweet, childish perfection of his features, the curl of his hair, the simple wholeheartedness of his play.

"He's so adorable," I gushed to Don, nearby.

"Yes," Don agreed.

The ball we were using had been a birthday present he'd picked out when Don's sister and mother had sent us money for his third birthday just over a year ago. This ball, with its motif of Spongebob and friends chasing cartoon jellyfish with their cartoon jellyfishing nets, has been beloved ever since.

Ulysses caught the ball. But instead of throwing it back again, this time he said, "No!"

He held the ball and inspected it, his brows knit. He looked over at me with a frown. He shook his head.

I wondered what was up.

"Not a Dora ball," he pronounced, firmly. "A Spongebob ball."

Crystallized cottonseed oil

2008-03-14T07:00:00.003-05:00

Bad: Cottonseed oil.

It's in a lot of processed foods. It was never considered fit for human consumption. Then in the 19th century some cotton magnates with a lot of extra cotton seeds on their hands figured out how to bleach out and otherwise refine away the horrible stench and flavor. Presto, they had a way to make money out of the garbage they were otherwise throwing away!

They packaged the result as imitation lard. For marketing purposes, they claimed it was even better than the real thing. (Why wouldn't they?) The most famous brand name, from a contraction (almost) of CRYStallized Cottonseed Oil: Crisco.

I don't care if the label does say "Zero grams trans fat per serving" (an ominous qualifier if ever there was one). The stuff is not for eating.

For more information, Google "crisco cottonseed lard," and visit:

The Rise and Fall of Crisco
Going Back to Lard for Old Time Pies, by Elizabeth Dougherty, in The Boston Globe

***

All things in moderation

2008-03-09T10:40:00.005-05:00

I posted this (I've made a few changes) as a comment on Michael Eades' Protein Power site. Here's the page:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/saturated-fat/is-there-a-single-save-your-heart-diet/#comment-111438
(If you don't see it there, it's still in moderation.)

***

For years, I've heard people solemnly pronounce "all things in moderation" as the key to the ideal, healthful, wise diet. It drives me crazy.

"All things in moderation" is a meaningless utterance.

"Moderation" is a completely relative term. It means exactly what the speaker thinks it means, and carries no quantitative information. My moderate amount of butter might be a tablespoon a day; Lofat Lola's might be that amount over the course of a month; I know people who consume a stick a day, and for them, that's a moderate amount. When you point this out to people, they balk; they don't like the idea that not everyone shares their internalized set of guidelines for moderation. But, I say, that's exactly what's at issue: how much of this, that, and the other thing is an appropriate amount and frequency?

Then there's the "all things" part. Also meaningless. Usually people wield it to disparage people with diets more restrictive than their own. For instance, to say that vegans "go too far" in excluding animal foods from their diet. (I put that in quotes because it presupposes that the direction itself is correct.) However, those people don't like it pointed out that they themselves exclude things that other people eat. The Masai thrive on a mixture of cow's milk and cow's blood. Without that in your diet, at least from time to time, you're not getting your moderate amount of "all things." Oh, but that doesn't count, because we don't eat that. Right. The vegan can say the same thing about Brie.

For the "all things in moderation"ist, the concept of "all" is also perfectly subjective. It doesn't include every substance under the sun, or even every edible substance. It includes exactly what they think is a fitting foodstuff; no more, and no less. If they don't happen to think MSG or HFCS is a big deal, they'll say of it, "Everything in moderation." If they do happen to think HFCS is unfit for human consumption, they'll say the exact same thing, but with HFCS specifically excluded from "everything." Along with chocolate-covered ants, horse meat, and whatever else they don't happen to like.

Intermittent fasting and the aquatic ape

2008-03-07T07:58:00.007-06:00

I think about the Aquatic Ape hypothesis of human development a lot more than I write about it. In fact, it informs close to everything about the way I see human life. I've wanted to write about it for years, but it's so big for me, that the task is overwhelming.

So now, whenever I do write a little bit about it, or have a thought, I'll put it here. Incomplete, hasty, unreferenced, and all. For now. It's a start.

I posted the following today on a thread about Intermittent Fasting. Much discussion of this topic seems to center around, or at least harbor, the assumption that Paelolithic and pre-agricultural humans, and proto-humans, would not have been able to eat at regular intervals. This is my contribution to the discussion, which can be found here.

Just a little background: The Inuit at the time mentioned (early 20th century) lived a traditional lifestyle and ate their traditional diet, which was almost entirely fish and water. They also ate some land mammal meat. They were known for their remarkable good health. No vegetables -- yet no scurvy, or other chronic diseases.

------------

In Adventures in Diet, Vil describes three squares plus a snack for the Inuit. Times he mentions for eating, or for beginning meal prep, are 7 am, 11 am, 4 pm, and for the snack, just before bed.

Now I'm going to bring up the Aquatic Ape again. That's the hypothesis that says many human features can be explained by a period in our evolution during which circumstances led us to begin to evolve into aquatic mammals, but the process was only partial. According to this, we can understand some things about ourselves by reference to other aquatic mammals or by reference to our affinity to aquatic and semi-aquatic conditions. (The big flaw I saw in the supposed refutation of this that someone posted a link to on another thread was that the guy pointed to all kinds of way that we are not totally like aquatic mammals. Well, no kidding. The hypothesis explains the ways in which we're [i]partially[/i] aquatic like. For instance... oh, I need to save that for another thread.)

Fish. Three times a day plus snacks. Pretty easy to come by. Even today, if a person dwells by open bodies of water, like a lake or a river. (Today, every person dwells by water -- we had to invent plumbing and wells to make that possible. But I'm talking about open water, including, human-made lakes.) Of course, there's pollution, unfortunately, that can make the catch toxic. But the point is, it's not hard to get enough fish to eat all day, even now.

When we think of pre-agricultural humans, for some reason we tend to think of them rummaging around on land, foraging (most people, not necessarily Bus riders) and hunting. And in that scenario, it sounds difficult to scrounge up three squares and a snack, day in day out. Exhausting. Time consuming. Bloody and messy, with fur and bones everywhere.

For some reason that I can't explain, people just don't put food from the water in a central place in the equation. But I assure you, if you were out in the middle of nowhere and needed to survive, you would find water, very quickly. You'd need it before, and more frequently than food. And in that water, you'd find things to eat far easier to catch and kill than anything on land. Except, of course, for bugs. And our primal ancestors were insectivores.

It makes sense to me that fish and other water critters are a missing food link between insects and big land animals. From the water is where we got enough protein and Omega 3 to grow brains big enough to figure out how to kill the animals we need considerable intelligence to kill. We don't have the teeth and claws and speed to hunt a gazells. We have the [i]brains[/i] to do it.

Back to the point. People think the Paleo folks must have had a lifestyle involving long periods between meals, including intervals of days. I acknowledge that there are more recent hunter societies where this has been known to occur. However, I disagree that it was a necessary, ordinary, universal feature of preagricultural human and protohuman life. Not when a meal is as near as the river, pond, lake or ocean.

Doctor U and the animals

2008-03-06T14:01:00.006-06:00

The other day when I came home from work, Don was excited to tell me that he and U had tended to Teddy Bear for hours, with the medical kit he got for his fourth birthday from our friend Sharon.

"He listened to Teddy Bear's heartbeat with the stethoscope," he said, "I looked around through the scope and said, 'Hmm. Yes. I see,' and then Ulysses did the same. Then Ulysses said he had a boo-boo and put the band-aid on his arm." The medical kit has a stiff bracelet sort of band-aid thing.

"Did you take his temperature?"

"Of course!"

Our friend Gigi gave Ulysses the teddy bear years ago, as a birth present. Just recently, he's begun carrying it around, carrying it to bed, asking for "Teddy Bear" by name. It's the first time he's formed an attachment with a stuffed animal as a friend.

Ulysses also made instant friends with his stuffed Boowa and Kwala dolls, characters from the Uptoten.com web site that he loves. We got them as a bonus for signing up for a year's service with the site a couple of months ago; we saved them for a birthday present. He was thrilled to see them -- he smiled and hugged them lovingly when he discovered them in the gold-foil cardboard box I'd put them in. Now they hang out with Teddy Bear, and they all go to bed with him together.

A couple of nights ago, he held Boowa in one hand and Kwala in the other, speaking for them and bobbing them up and down in turn. "Boo ha wa ma ba ba ba?" said Boowa. "Ooh, wah wah! Ooh, wah!" answered Kwala.

When he wakes up in the morning, he totters out from the bedroom carrying them all in his arms. He used to bring a handkerchief with him. And present it to us proudly, as if it were a trophy or some sort. Now it's the trio.

He hugs them in a bundle to his chest and says "Animals!"

I can't hear you!

2008-02-26T20:08:00.006-06:00

Every once in a while, Ulysses will cover his ears with the palms of his hands, stand in front of me and shout, at the top of his voice, "Mama! I can't hear you!"

He hadn't played that gag for a couple of months or so, but he did it once late last week. I'd forgotten about it until then. I figured I'd better hurry up and write it down.

>p?

Voting: Very important

2008-02-20T06:52:00.012-06:00

I told Ulysses I was going out to vote last evening -- did he want to come with me? To my surprise, he said, "Okay!" He's been cabin bound nearly all winter, rejecting almost every suggestion, exhortation and command to venture into the coldest, snowiest winter in Wisconsin history.

This time, though, he said, "Beep, beep! Ride in the green car. Okay!" So we bundled up and rolled off into the quiet dark, passing the snow-banked yards and medians until we came to the bustling parking lot of the Warner Park Community Recreation Center, our voting place. The tall evergreen by the entrance was draped all over with tiny, blue lights.

"Mama!" said Ulysses. "A Christmassy tree!"

As we were exiting the car, I offered to put on his hands the gloves I've been carrying in my handbag all winter, in the hopes he'd wear them. He wore mittens when he was a baby, but has refused mittens and gloves for the last few years. It puts quite the damper on any chance for snow play. He surprised me again: "Glubs? Okay!" His fingers wriggled unceasingly and unhelpfully, but his face was serene as I worked five-finger gloves onto his hands for the first time ever.

In the polling room, he followed me to the booth, asking, "What doing, Mama?"

"I'm going to vote now."

"Vote," he echoed.

I positioned my paper ballot on the booth's writing ledge. "It's very important."

"Very impor-tat. What doing, Mama? What doing?"

Marking my choices, I answered, "This is how everybody decides what to do."

"Impor-tat."

We walked to the ballot receiving machine and I offered him the ballot to feed into the slot. "In the old days, someone told everyone what to do. Now we all decide together," I said.

He pushed gently at the paper until the rollers engaged. "Yay! We did it!" he exclaimed as my vote disappeared into the monolithic casing of the ballot machine.

I thought about what, if anything, to say next. That in plenty of the world, it was still those old days? That even here and now, plenty of people want to tell everyone what to do?

"I voted!" I said.

***

U's Fourth Birthday, Part IV

2008-02-17T20:43:00.004-06:00

I enlisted other guests' party services while I frosted the cake. Jennifer mixed icing colors for decorating the cake. Gloria, Vicky and Nico festooned the kitchen/dining area with "Happy Birthday" balloons (Jennifer kindly stopped to buy them on her way) and Hot Wheels crepe paper streamers.

These were the same rolls of Hot Wheels streamers that Don's mother bought when she was here for U's second birthday. It had been really hard to find party stuff at the party store that didn't have licensed character stuff on it: Spongebob, Dora, Barbie, Hot Wheels. We hadn't been able to find trademark-free streamers at all, so I decided on the Hot Wheels streamers, because, outside the commercial turnoff, they were cool looking: orange flames racing down a red background. The design actually worked with the concept of a streamer, unlike all the others.

***

Sigurd's job was blowing up balloons, to Ulysses's delight. The rest of the gang, when they were done making the streamer maze in the kitchen, joined S and U in the living room and formed a balloon-blowing-up-and-playing-with team. Gloria taught Ulysses the game of bat-the-balloon-in-the-air-and-don't-let-it-touch-the-ground. I watched and listened to the laughter and happy shouting while I puttered with the cake.

***

Ulysses ran into the kitchen -- to find me, to check on the progress with his cake, I guess. Or to tell me about the balloons, perhaps. But before he could tell me what he was about, he stopped short, looking up at the streamers and balloons everywhere.

"A party!" he said. "For me!"

"Yes!" I said. "It's your birthday party."

Ulysses lifted his arms out by his sides and began to hop up and down. "I'm dancing, Mama!" he said, smiling up at me. "I'm dancing!"

***

On Christmas day, Ulysses never did get around to opening all his presents. This morning, I'd re-wrapped in birthday-ish paper those little packages -- a Hot Wheels car still in its blister pack, a mesh sack of gold-wrapped chocolate coins, a jelly candy in the shape of a Christmas tree. He opened one of these to find a miniature ring toss game -- the kind where you press down on a button to make the rings swish through the water, and, ideally, land on a little peg. It was packaged in cellophane alongside a lollipop. "Merry Christmas!" the packaging announced. The lollipop was oblong, about 3/4" wide and 2" long, and striped diagonally with white, brown and forest green.

"Open, Mama-Tata! Open eh lollipop!" Sigurd pulled out his jacknife and worked free the tight neck of cellophane on the pop's stick.

Ulysses slipped away to the laptop workstation we set up for him recently, where he can stand and jump while he plays. He settled into some game play, licking on his lollipop, and the rest of us settled into conversation.

All at once, there was a cracking sound, and a scream came from Ulysses. The lollipop had somehow shattered into dozens of bits. Maybe it was exposed to heat or cold somewhere along the line? Or rattled against the ring-toss toy?

Don got to him first, with words of comfort. Ulysses held the lollipop up, smiling a little.

"Hix it, Tata," he implored. "Lollipop je broken."

"I can't fix that, Ulysses," he said. "It's too broken. I'm sorry."

A moment went by. Ulysses's face crumpled into tears. He sobbed and fell into Don's arms, then began to wander in little circles, crying quietly.

I remembered that in my handbag was a cinnamon lollipop U had picked out on our last visit to Shopko about a month ago. He'd never asked for it after we left the store. I ran to get it.

"Look at this Ulysses," I said, holding it near him. He turned quickly to see. The hope on his face turned dark. He shook his head slowly and looked at me.

"That's not a birthday lollipop," he choked through his tears.

I wish I could remember what Gloria said a few moments later that distracted him and made him laugh, forget the calamity of the birthday lollipop, and rejoin the party joy. She's better at cheering children up than I'll ever be.

U's Fourth Birthday, Part III

2008-02-17T19:49:00.010-06:00

After opening one big box -- the medical kit -- Ulysses was content to leave the rest of his presents alone. That was a relief, as Don went back to having a bit of alone time before the house filled up for the afternoon and evening, and I turned to my big project: the cake!

I tried again to interest Ulysses in the cake. Now that he had the experience of opening a birthday present, he should be more in the mood, I reasoned.

"Ulysses, what color birthday cake do you want?"

"No."

"We're having a party today! Our friends are coming over for your birthday!"

"No."

So much for that.

The KitchenAid whirred, creaming butter and sugar together as I got out the sifter and cake flour.

"Mombie!" Ulysses called from his computer workstation. "Quiet! I'm busy!"

Ever since Ulysses discovered zombies -- he loves them -- I've become "Mombie."

***

By and by, party time arrived. The cakes were out of the oven and people were coming over at any moment. Ulysses still wasn't on board for the celebration. I decided to try a new tactic. I went into the bedroom and changed into a velvet blouse, and flowing, hippieish skirt and vest. Even put on earrings. Why I don't bother putting on this sort of thing more often, I'm not sure, because it's my favorite way to dress. At any rate, I went over to Ulysses and somehow distracted him from the video game he was playing on the uptoten.com site.

"Look at me, Ulysses!"

He looked. "Mama!" he said.

"I'm dressed up for your party! And here's what you're wearing." I put some clothes by him, on the spot on the couch where we dress him.

"Party!" he said. "Party! Beep, beep! We're going ride in the green car? To party?"

"No!" I said. "We're having the party right here! People are coming to us!"

"Party, party!" he said, and jumped on the couch, sticking out his ankles for me to dress him.

***

A moment later, U was dressed and in the kitchen, pointing to the cakes cooling on the rack. "Cake! Candles?" I showed him the box of candles. "Candles!" he said, happily.

"What color do you want your birthday cake to be?" I said, jumping on my opportunity.

Silence. Uh-oh.

Just then, Don walked through the room, and said, into the silence, "Red!"

"Red!" echoed Ulysses. "Red cake!"

"Would you like a red cake for your birthday, Ulysses?" I asked.

"Red!" U exclaimed. "Red cake! Red cake. Red, red, red. Red birthday cake. Red, red, yellow. Yellow cake."

That threw me. I backed up. "What color birthday cake would you like?" I asked.

"Yellow cake. Yellow birthday cake." He rummaged through the little bottles of decorator coloring on the dining table. He'd seen them once before, last summer, when we made dough ornaments with Donald's mother out in the yard during her visit from Georgia. He picked out the one with a yellow sticker on top.

Holing the bottle of yellow coloring, he walked over to our freestanding dishwasher and picked up the clear, plastic container of white frosting that I'd pulled out of the refrigerator a little while earlier -- I had made it the day before, figuring I'd color it when Ulysses put in a request, but he hadn't seen it before that moment. Right next to it was the container of white decorator icing. That he passed over.

He brought these two items to me -- exactly the two items needed to frost a cake yellow -- and placed them on the kitchen counter in front of me.

"Here, Mombie. Here yellow. Yellow birthday cake. Yellow!"

***

I turned the frosting into a mixing bowl and added a little yellow coloring. As I was stirring it in, Ulysses exclaimed, "You're baking, Mama! You're baking!"

"How is this?" I asked. "Is this yellow enough? Or do you want it more yellow?"

"More yellow!"

More yellow he got.

U brought over the coloring jar labeled leaf green. "Green, Mama! Green!" I broke off a lump of the decorating icing I'd mixed the day before and stirred it together in a bowl with a bit of green coloring. "How's that? Is it green enough? Or do you want more green?"

"More green!" he answered. "Birthday cake!"

***

Our friend Jennifer showed up and began helping with the cake project. She stirred up some bright red icing. Actually, it looked more magenta than anything, even though the jar was labeled "Christmas red." Good thing no one was requesting a red cake.

***

Our friends Sigurd and Gloria came over with their kids, Nico and Vicky. I had just finished covering the cake with frosting and was starting to fill decorating tubes with icing for piping flowers and whatnot. "What kind of cake is it?" Vicky asked.

"Yellow," I answered.

"I can see that," she replied.

Oops. Right. This cake was blindingly yellow. Spongebob yellow. In fact, Sigurd had already asked whether it was a sponge cake. Ha, ha. I explained that I meant it was golden on the inside.

***

The recipe came from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. The same recipe I used to make Don's birthday cake a couple of months ago -- the only difference was that I'd stirred coconut flakes into the frosting of his cake, and topped it with toasted coconut besides.

Last year, I read about cake baking and decorating for weeks in advance of U's third b-day. I practiced piping Crisco into flowers and borders and garlands for days. And then I followed recipes from Rose Levy Berenbaum's esteemed The Cake Bible to end up with a delicious, but complicated to make, buttercream frosting that never set up, even after I doubled the amount of powdered sugar in it, runny decorating icing that made its way to the base of the cake minutes after it was applied, and a dryish cake.

This year, I went with Bittman. For Donald's cake, I had used royal icing, which, it turns out, becomes rock hard shortly after application. This time, I used the 1974 Joy of Cooking's Decorative Icing, substituting organic palm oil for vegetable shortening. Perfect results, but a bit stiff.

***

For the writing, I mixed up some brown coloring with a lump of icing. I added some peanut oil to thin it sufficiently for handwriting.

It occured to me, as I mixed this, that it looked exactly like rich, luscious chocolate. Somehow I hadn't seen that coming. I thought it would be unpleasant and confusing to the palate to encounter something that looked this much like chocolate, but didn't taste chocolate, so I poured in some cocoa powder, enough to match in flavor the intense dark color of the icing. Plenty of cocoa powder.

Then it struck me that I could've skipped the brown coloring altogether.

***

U's Fourth Birthday, Part II

2008-02-17T15:00:00.007-06:00

While Don and I were discussing, once again, how to introduce the birthday topic to Ulysses today, he stumbled, half-awake, into the office. There we were, surrounded by wrapping paper and wrapped presents. Red-handed! Fortunately, his consciousness was semi enough that I could easily divert his gaze and lead him out of the room before he registered any of it. And all was good cheer.

Several minutes later, Donald guided U to the uptoten.com page with the birthday greeting that awaited him that day: cartoon characters Boowa and Kwala singing lustily, "Happy birthday to you, to you! Happy birthday to ..."

"No," said Ulysses. "No, no, noooo!"

Oops. Too different, too early. Retreat, retreat! Back to good cheer.

A little after that, cuddling on the couch with Ulysses, I told him, "Today is your birthday, Ulysses!"

"No," he said.

"I'm going to make your birthday cake now!"

"No."

"What kind of cake would you like?"

"No."

I dropped the subject.

A little while later, Ulysses wandered back into the office. From where I was working in the kitchen, I could hear this conversation with Don.

"Wow! Present!"

"That's for later, when we have the cake."

"Present! Present!"

"No, Ulysses, you can't open them now. That's for later, when we have cake!" Don was starting to sound a little desperate.

"Yes! Present."

"No, Ulysses! You can't open that now. Mama will be upset!"

Suddenly I realized that Don's main worry was that he -- Don, that is -- would be in trouble with me if he let Ulysses open his presents early. Well, I thought, this stuff is supposed to bring fun. Not fear and misery. So I called out, "He can open his presents!"

"OK, Ulysses, you can open a present," said Don, but Ulysses had already carried the biggest box halfway across the house and over to his train table, which hasn't been repopulated with trains and tracks since we put it aside for the Christmas tree in December. We've left it clear for now, and figured it would make a good play space and present opening space for U's upcoming birthday. Evidently U had come to the same conclusion.

Ulysses worked off the paper to reveal ... the present our friend Sharon had sent us for Christmas of Aught Five! We had decided back then to give it to Ulysses when he had grown enough to understand what it was. A toy medical kit! At the time, when he was not quite two, it would've just been a random collection of interesting shapes to him. It seemed like a waste of such a beautifully presented set to give it to him at that time. By the time he was old enough to understand it, it would've been worn out, the pieces separated, the brand-new sheen worn off.

Over the past couple of months, Ulysses has picked up the relevant concepts and vocabulary: doctor, medicine, Band-Aid. And then there's: "Fix it," "It's broken," "Ow! That hurt!" and "I bonka'd my head!" Since last summer he's learned the names of a lot of body parts also, starting with head, and followed soon after with eye and foot. One of his favorite books is Maisy the Doctor. On uptoten.com one of his favorite games involves helping Kwala take medicine, get a shot, take a temperature, and so forth. Kwala sings a song, "I'm not scared of anything," through this ordeal in her sick bed. So this morning we rewrapped it in birthday paper (the original Xmas-themed wrapping was long gone) for four-year-old U.

And so he was thrilled to see the doctor kit! "Open the box! Help!" he said, and we obliged. He picked out the stethoscope and, to our surprise, directed the earpieces towards his head, held the resonator disk to his chest, and said, "Ba-BOOM! Ba-BOOM! Ba-BOOM!" Donald and traded glances and exclamations of the form "I didn't know he knew that."

He picked up the toy blood pressure measure and Don showed him how to squeeze the bladder. It made the needle spin on the dial. Ulysses squeezed happily, saying, "Around and around and around and around!"

"Is happy!" said Ulysses at the thermometer's 98.6 position, helpfully illustrated with a happy face as well as the Centigrade equivalent. "Is sad!" he said at the sad-face-fever setting.

He picked up the syringe and started pretend-plunging it into his arm.

"Oh, great," I said, "He must have gotten that watching Pulp Fiction."

"He's not shooting up!" said Donald. "He's drawing blood."

Later, at the party, I heard Don confessing to Sigurd and Gloria that he'd just been sticking up for Ulysses in saying that.

U's Fourth Birthday

2008-02-16T07:52:00.005-06:00

Today is Ulysses's fourth birthday. He's not awake yet. We still are deciding how to present the whole birthday situation to him. I've been thinking about it nonstop for over a month, but I hestitated to say, "Ulysses, your birthday is coming in a month!" because I didn't want him to respond, as I've heard tots do, ten minutes later with "Is it my birthday yet? Has it been a month? Where's my cake? Where's the party? Wah!"

I thought we might tell him it's his birthday when he wakes up and comes stumping half-asleep from the bedroom. He's often super chipper at that time, but it's somewhat deceptive. It's a fragile moment, that newly awakened conscious state. Any bit of information or happening that's out of the ordinary -- good, bad or neutral -- can knock him out of his happy mood, and then the reparations can be extensive. A few days ago he awoke sunny and bouncy, seemingly completely awake. But a few minutes after our happy morning greetings the horn sound on his racing game didn't work. He was instantly inconsolable, and he panicked at the sight of our touching the computer to fix it. I had to hold him back physically while Don rebooted the computer and relaunched the program -- the only way out of the situation was straight through. U couldn't bring himself to try the game again until later in the morning. It was all too devastating, evidently.

Had the horn malfunction happened a half hour later, the whole scenario would have been different. He would have simply called to us or come to us: "Mama, Tata, horn not working, race je broken! Hix it?" ("Je" is Serbian for "is"; he uses Serbian for some parts of speech. "Hix" is "fix.") We would have fixed it quickly and been heroes, and the pleasant morning would have continued. Sigh.

So I thought we'd break the birthday news a little past that fragility window. But when? How soon, how late? Hey, Ulysses, by the way ... it's your birthday today! Huh? Where did that come from?

Don said we should tell him at the party this afternoon, when people start coming over. He said, "It'll be a 'Surprise, it's your birthday' party!" I couldn't figure out whether he was joking or not.

Meantime, I noticed a couple of days ago that he'd dug out and has been keeping close at hand a certain, tiny, board book that he hasn't read for a couple of years. I don't even know where he found it. It's called "The Birthday." It's all about a fox having a birthday party and all his little animal friends preparing a cake and so forth. The last time he read it was just around his second birthday. He carried it around with him for days, paging through it over and over, up through his birthday. That was the last I remember seeing him handle it.

He's got to know more about stuff than I've been giving him credit for.

U's fourth: the prep

2008-02-15T14:08:00.002-06:00

Ulysses's birthday is tomorrow and I wanted to make for a more fun and relaxed weekend by making it a three-day one. I'm puttering around cleaning and cooking stuff for tomorrow. I just made some buttercream frosting. I tasted a little and it had that rough, scratchy quality that mars the taste of frosting. Uh oh.

I was hoping it would go away by tomorrow -- that maybe it was the coarseness of the sugar that hadn't been absorbed into the butter and cream yet.

Then I was looking for decorative icing recipes and I came across this nugget of info in the (old) Joy of Cooking: it said that the cornstarch they put in confectioner's sugar has a raw taste and if you want it go away, heat it over boiling water for a little while. Oops. Too late for that. Now I'm thinking maybe this is just a brand of sugar that has a lot of cornstarch in it and I'm basically screwed. Then I remembered seeing, the other day at the natural food store, a bag of all-natural confectioner's sugar, but it was like four bucks. Do you have to pay four bucks instead of one just to get sugar that's all sugar and not sugar plus? Geez.

Well, I just hope the frosting tastes better by tomorrow. I'm about to make a decorative icing with more confectioner's sugar, cream and veg shortening. And vanilla. I hope it tastes OK. I am not of the school of thought that says it doesn't matter what a birthday cake tastes like, as long as it's there and pretty.

***

Oh, good. I just retasted that frosting and now it tastes good. The vanilla came to the fore instead of the powderyness. So maybe it was just a matter of letting everything get absorbed.

Last year for U's birthday I bought a bunch of frosting tips. I look forward to using them again!

Vanilice

2008-02-14T13:44:00.008-06:00

We had a bake-off at work today. Fifteen or so contestants brought in cookies, cupcakes, breads and such, and seven judges, also co-workers, sampled them all. Each wrote their two favorites on a slip of paper. The three entries that got the most votes were the winners. I didn't win, place or show, but I did get a lot of compliments! And I had a lot of fun.

I made vanilice, which I've blogged about before. Here's what I wrote in 2005.

Today (writing as quickly as I could during work time!) I updated what I wrote in that post, and made some corrections that I've learned of since. Below is what I printed and placed next to my platter of cookies.

Vanilice (va-NEE-leet-seh)
Serbian holiday cookies.

Tiny, elaborate cookies are a Serbian favorite around the winter holiday season, which, for Serbs in America, can stretch from the buildup to “American Christmas” on December 25 through Eastern Orthodox Christmas on January 7 and even Serbian New Year's on January 14! As a category, they’re called “sitni kolaci” (SEET-nee ko-LACH-ee), meaning tiny cakes.

These are based on my Grandaunt Naka's “vanil grancle” (VAH-neel GRAHNT-sleh). My cousin (her granddaughter) reminisced recently: “They were my favorite cookies growing up and haven't had them since she passed away five years ago. She used to make them up until the time she died, despite the fact that her hands were almost crippled from arthritis. I used to eat each one slowly and carefully thinking of her crippled fingers making them lovingly for us. She would make hundreds each year – they were among her specialties. I really think she was a master baker among Serbian women, who are really mostly master bakers.”

Naka and her daughter – my aunt – came to the US from a place called Kikinda in a region known as the Banat, an ancient term meaning “frontier.” The region is famous for is delicious apricots. My mother and her brother (my uncle) come from Ruma, a little town in Srem, which is renowned for its cherries. It’s in honor of these two branches of my own heritage that I make half my vanilice with cherry conserve, and half with the more traditional apricot jam.

Hardware note
You will need two sizes of cookie cutters to make the rounds and the windows in half of the rounds. Scrounge about the house for bottle tops that will yield pleasing results, as I did for years – or do yourself a favor and invest a few dollars in a set of round pastry cutters at a kitchen supply store or Web site, or a restaurant supply store. These will serve you well for the rest of your life!

Production
1 1/2 stick butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla (2 for extra flavor)
2 cups all-purpose flour

Finishing
Powdered sugar
Apricot jam, cherry jam, or other kind of jam

Method
Cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Work in the flour. The result will be a soft, easily crumbled dough about the consistency of pie crust.

Roll out to about 1/8" thickness. (I use a ruler.) Use plenty of flour on the board, and sprinkle flour atop the dough so that the pin doesn’t stick. Cut the dough into rounds about 1 3/4" in diameter. Into half of the rounds, cut a hole of about 7/8 " in diameter. These will be the cookie tops. Keep re-rolling until all the dough is used. If the dough gets too sticky to work, refrigerate it for a while.

Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet at 300° F for 10 minutes. They do not need to brown at all. Do not overbake. Let cool before handling. They are crumbly and fragile while still hot.

Spread about 1/4- to 1/2 tsp of jam on the solid rounds. Atop each round, place one of the rounds with a hole cut into it.

Dust each cookie with powdered sugar. To accomplish this, put about a three-inch deep layer of powdered sugar into a bowl or deep dish. Lightly drop each cookie into the sugar, first bottom down, then top down. Gently knock off any extra clumps of sugar.

I like to do the sugar dusting the day after the jam sandwiching. The cookie sandwiches are less likely to fall apart after the jam has had a chance to set up.

Don't worry about getting powdered sugar on the pretty jam centers. It'll be absorbed and invisible in the space of an hour.

Arrange on a platter. These are better at least a day later, when their flavor has had time to develop.

Yield: about 3 dozen cookies.

Real dogs

2008-02-10T12:13:00.001-06:00

I'm roasting some bones in the oven for beef stock. After they brown nicely -- developing a range of deep flavors -- I'll simmer in water in my stock pot into the evening. See the chicken stock post of a little earlier for more comments on stock making. As with chicken stock, I won't add salt or other seasonings. Just let the bones and marrow do their thing. We haven't had homemade beef broth for several years -- dunno why, just one of those things -- so I'm psyched.

I hadn't realized how easy it was to get beef bones. I asked a manager type at my local, locally owned grocery this morning, "How can I get bones for making beef stock?" thinking he'd have to go into the back and dig some out for me. He pointed to the freezer case two feet from where we were standing. "Right there!" he answered, and we both laughed a little.

I looked at the label. They were labeled "Dog Bones" and priced at $1.29 per pound. I picked out about $6 worth, 4 1/2 pounds or so.

I made some remark about how funny it was that people consider these to be just for dogs, when they make the most wonderful beef stock possible.

The manager guy nodded. "Yes!" he agreed. "Cooking is such a dying art."

"Not at our house!" I said, "We're just getting going."

"Ours, too!" he said.

We commiserated for a few moments about The State of Things, and parted best of beef-eating buddies, as it were.

Minutes later, I was in the checkout line. The cashier asked me about the bones -- what was I going to use them for?

"Stock," I said, "Like broth or bullion. You just roast them in the oven, and then simmer them in water for a while. It makes the most delicious stock, so much better than anything you could get from a can or a bullion cube." She was looking at me intently, so I went on. "Then you just use it for starting soups, or whatever. Wherever you would use stock. Like when a recipe calls for stock, or bullion cubes."

She nodded and continued ringing out my groceries.

Finally she asked the question that must have been on her mind all the while.

"Are they really made of real dogs?"

Egg Drop Soup

2008-01-27T15:44:00.001-06:00

The reason I went through the trouble of posting about chicken stock just now was so I could write about the incredible egg drop soup I just made. Warm, comforting, energizing, just spicy enough.

I've always loved egg drop soup, or, more accurately, what I always thought egg drop soup ought to be. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten worse over the years. I order it with high hopes with Chinese food, but it arrives as a useless chemical concoction of flavorings and cornstarch thickening. With a perfectly nice egg, cooked to a lovely lacyness, wasted in this sea of fabricated foodstuff.

Today I experimented with the homemade chicken stock we made yesterday. When I pulled it from the refrigerator it was thick with natural gelatin, almost as solid as Jell-O. The color was a deep tan. I wanted to make a simple chicken soup with it, but I had no chicken on hand. I'm doing an ultra-low-carb thing right now, so noodles were out of the picture, too. Then I thought of egg drop soup.

Before you heat it and add the seasoning, the stock will taste like greasy nothing. That's OK. With heat and salt, the texture will become velvety and good and the taste will fairly burst from the spoon.

Before you add the egg, the soup will taste as if you've seasoned and salted it too aggressively. That's OK. Egg takes up seasoning and salt.

If you use commercial stock, you'll need to reduce the salt you add to make up for what's already in it.

Don't keep boiling after the egg is cooked, or it'll become tough, and its delicate flavor will be lost.

If you're serving more than one, make separate servings in succession.

Egg Drop Soup

1 cup homemade chicken stock
1/4 teaspoon salt
grindings of pepper
light shake of red pepper flakes
1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon paprika

1 egg, beaten to combine yolk and white

In a narrow, deep saucepan, combine all ingredients except the egg. Simmer for about five minutes, to combine flavors.

Turn heat to the highest and bring to a rapid boil. Stir the soup rapidly, so that it whirls and ideally dips like a funnel in the center.

Pour the egg in a thin stream into the soup, allowing it to whirl around. It will cook as it enters the water.

Immediately transfer the soup to a bowl and enjoy.

Chicken Stock

2008-01-27T14:39:00.001-06:00

Make stock. It's one of the cheapest and easiest things you can do to make your cooking better. How cheap? Free. That is, unless you figure in the energy cost of running low heat on a stovetop burner for several hours and storing it in the freezer. How easy? About as easy as filling a pot with water and turning on the heat.

Homemade stock adds depth and richness of flavor to foods that just can't be matched by canned versions or, heaven forbid, by powdered or cubed facsimiles. It's loaded with wholesome goodness. When I make up a batch of this, I'm always astounded by how much delectable nutrition just as easily could have ended up in the garbage.

Use in any recipe calling for any kind of stock or broth. Substitute for water anywhere you'd like more taste and nutrition. For instance, we cook rice in homemade stock instead of water.

Most recipes I've found for homemade stock call for various seasonings and aromatics -- celery, onions, salt, pepper, carrots. Our theory is, why bother? You're going to be seasoning whatever you're cooking the way you want it anyway. Keep the stock just stock.

Also, most recipes I've found call for using a whole chicken or two, that you throw out after cooking the stock. Our theory is, why buy a chicken just to throw it out? Why waste the wonderful meat by rendering it unpalatable through hours of boiling? Why buy a chicken for stock when you probably already are buying the ideal ingredients -- the bones that come inside whatever chicken you buy -- and then throwing them away?

To take the conversation to another level, I believe taking the life of a living creature for food is a serious, profound business. I believe that using everything possible is one way to respect that life. That's why, for instance, we never throw a scrap of meat leftovers or cuttings away; we give them to the animals outside. It's one reason that we strain and save bacon drippings in a jar for later use. And it's a reason for saving bones for stock, a reason that for me goes far beyond its astonishingly rich, velvety goodness. Somehow the wonderfulness of the stock and the rightness of the act are facets of a whole to me. It ties in with my belief that the best food tastes the best -- flavor and eating experience is inseparable from how good it is for you and how good it is for the rest of the world and its beings.

Of course, starting with a backyard chicken would be better for all that. I have no doubt it would taste better, also.

Chicken Stock

Ingredients
Two zip-top gallon bags stuffed with chicken bones
Water

Equipment
Stockpot (see notes below)
Strainer

Yield
About 24 cups (1.5 gallons) stock. These are more concentrated than canned stock. Each cup is equivalent to about two cups commercial stock. When using in a recipe, add more water to make up for that. (Like when you add a can of water to a can of condensed soup.) Generally speaking, the precise amount of stock you use isn't as critical as getting the liquid content of the recipe to add up.

Method
I. Collect bones
Whenever you have chicken, don't throw out the bones. Keep a gallon-sized zip-top bag in the freezer and add the bones to it after your meal. Skin, cartilage, necks -- everything just goes in there. Not organs, though -- they would make the stock bitter.

When you have two of these bags filled up, you're ready. You can use fried, roasted, rotisserie chicken -- just about anything. The only bones I don't use are those from a slow-braised dish that cooked for hours. I figure the goodness of the bones has already stewed out into the original dish.

II. Make stock
Place the bones into a stockpot. Fill with water to a couple of inches from the top of the pot. Bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for several hours. Establish the lowest, slowest bubbling you can.

I start as early in the morning as possible, so I can simmer for at least ten hours. I turn off the flame two hours before I plan to go to bed. It takes at least an hour and a half for it to cool enough to handle easily.

The simmering requires virtually no maintenance. You can even leave the house, if you trust your stove flame to not blow out. If you use an electric stove, walking away from it is about as safe as leaving a crockpot going while you're at work. If you're going out for only an hour or so, and you're nervous about leaving the stove on, just turn it off when you leave and turn it back on when you return.

We use a Lincoln Wear-Ever 9-quart stockpot made of thick, restaurant-grade aluminum. It's light for its size and it only cost about 40 bucks, including the lid. We got it from a local restaurant-supply store.

III. Put away
Strain the stock into a large, metal mixing bowl, letting the bones collect in the strainer. You can do this in stages if you don't have a bowl big enough to receive all the stock.

Ladle your stock into small plastic containers. We use one-cup yogurt containers from the days when yogurt (a) came in 8 ounce servings instead of 6-ounce servings and (b) came with replaceable plastic lids instead of foil-only tops. However, 1-cup containers are easy enough to find at the supermarket.

Remember that water expands as it freezes; don't fill your containers to the rim. Leave about 3/4 inch from the top. Place lids on.

Carefully line up the filled containers in your freezer. We arrange ours on trays that we stack into makeshift shelves in the freezer.

Discard the bones. We put them in the backyard where animals come and get them. There are never bones or debris left in the yard a day or two later. Don't worry about choking any critters. The bones are so soft by this point, you can bend and tear them as easily as cardboard.

IV. Use
Move stock cups from freezer to fridge a day or two before you plan to use them. Or, as we do most often, grab one from the freezer and run it under a hot tap until you can unmold the contents into a saucepan for thawing on the stovetop.

You can leave some stock in the refrigerator so you don't need to deal with thawing it before use. As much as you anticipate using over the next ten days or so.

Mayonnaise recipe

2008-01-20T19:23:00.002-06:00

Another one of those things that's ridiculously easy to make at home. Maybe it is or isn't cheaper than what you can find at the store. But you control what is in it. And you won't find it fresher or more delicious anywhere else.

1-2 tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice (adjust to your taste near the end)
1/4 teaspoon salt
dash cayenne or other red pepper
light grinding of black pepper
1 egg
1 cup oil

In the pitcher of a blender, mixing bowl or food processor, mix together everything except 3/4 cup of the oil. Process for several seconds.

With the motor running, pour the oil in a thin stream through the opening of the lid (or into the mixer bowl). Continue until you've added all the oil. Go slowly enough that this takes about a minute.

Now you have mayonnaise.

Added paragraph 7/19/08: Taste and adjust salt, pepper, vinegar and lemon juice until the flavor balance is to your liking. You may like a more assertive mayo. You can get out your favorite commercial mayonnaise and do side-by-side testing until you have the seasoning tweaked just as you like it. Then write it down so you remake it just the way you like it ever after.

Put it in an old mayonnaise jar and refrigerate for up to a month. (Edited 7/19/08. I used to guess at two weeks, but I've since kept mayo for over a month just fine.)

A note on what just happened.
To "emulsify" means to mix together two liquids that don't like to be mixed together. Through the rapid beating and slow addition of the oil, the oil and egg have become emulsified. They're now beaten together into tiny little bubbles that reflect the light -- that's why the two transparent substances are now white and opaque.

A note on oil.
My understanding is that mayonnaise is classically made with extra-virgin olive oil. I don't like the heavy flavor when it's made this way; I'm used to clean, neutral tastes in mayonnaise. I use part olive oil and part neutral-tasting oil. I'm still searching for the most naturally made oil for this application. The one I made today was half olive and half corn. Peanut would also be a candidate.

Added paragraph 7/19/08: I tried a half peanut oil, half coconut oil mayonnaise. It's very coconutty. If you want a tropical effect from your mayonnaise, it works great. If you want a neutral spread, coconut is not the way to go..

A note on egg.
Harold McGee has a system for "safe" mayonnaise that involves using the microwave to sort of pasteurize the egg. You might be able to find it with an Internet search. It's also included in Mark Bittman's wonderful "How To Cook Everything," from which I got the basis of this mayonnaise recipe. But for myself, I'm not concerned about egg safety. We get all our eggs from free-range, healthy hens. Those horrible diseases occur in animals that are treatly horribly.

A note on acid.
Bittman says lemon is the perfect liquid for mayonnaise. I disagree. The mayonnaise I made following his recipe exactly (2 tablespoons lemon, 1 cup olive oil) tasted exactly like cod liver oil. It really was uncanny. I've been trying to use it up in tuna salad and fish cookery, because it turns everything milder into a strange fishy thing.

Enjoy!

How to make ghee

2008-01-15T07:05:00.001-06:00

Ghee is butter with the milk solids and water removed. Pure dairy fat! Just heat butter gently, and the components will separate. Then strain. A more detailed explanation of method follows below.

Ghee has a higher smoke point than butter -- meaning you can cook and saute hotter in it without burning. It's stable at room temperature. You can keep it in a jar by the stove and scoop into it whenever you would customarily run to fridge for a pat of butter for the pan. No refrigeration necessary.

We use an old-fashioned "grease jar," which every self-respecting household use to keep handy for bacon drippings, before they learned how horrible and disgusting a practice that was. Now everyone knows you should throw away that natural nutrient and spend additional money to obtain the fabricated nutrient that the food industry kindly provides at a nominal cost to you. Thank goodness modern technology has devised methods of wrenching the nearly digestable oils from all kinds of items that humans never had the option to eat before. And that modern marketing has managed to convince people that good health is impossible without them! Gee, just think what the human race was missing all these millions of years.

But I digress. This post is about ghee, not gee! Much of traditional Indian cookery uses this. The flavor is similar to butter, but the profile is somewhat different because of the absence of milk solids. The "milky" flavors are gone. That, and a slightly grainy texture, makes it less suited than butter for buttering bread tableside.

In ghee, the nutty buttery qualities are closer to the fore. With a little extra cooking time, a pleasant toasty quality develops, also.

Ingredient

Butter

One pound is a good amount to work with. We use European butter with the super-high fat content. No matter what kind of butter you start out with, the fat is all that will be left when you're done. You might as well buy something that contains more of what you'll be keeping in the first place. That is, the regular butter has more of what you're getting rid of by making ghee. Whatever isn't fat is water and milk solids. If there's less of that in the butter you buy, it should take less time to boil it out, logically, and you'll wind up with more finished product.

Method
Essentially, place the butter in a small, sturdy saucepan over the lowest heat, wait and strain

First the butter will melt. The milk solids will gradually rise to the top. No need to skim as you go. Some recipes instruct you to skim. This is more work, and wastes a lot of butter. It's just not necessary.

The water in the butter will begin to boil out. Water boils; oil/fat doesn't.

Eventually, all bubbling will cease. That means the water has left. There's a window of time between the moment the water is all gone, when the remaining ghee begins to toast pleasantly, and the moment when the ghee becomes brown and yucky and burnt. This all happens very quickly, because when the water is gone, the temperature is suddenly able to rise much higher That's because water only gets to boiling temperature. Then it evaporates and rises into the air (which is what "boiling" is). Oil can get hundreds of degrees hotter.

So, it's better to err on the early side, at least while you're still getting familiar with this process and product. Pour through a mesh strainer lined with a coffee filter or paper towel. Remember that at this stage it's super hot, much hotter than boiling water. Pour it into something that is heat resistant, like Pyrex or metal.

The dairy solids will stay behind in the strainer. Eat them warm. They are unspeakably delicious! Those who eat crackers or toast can spread them on that. Others can nibble them off a spoon.

Tasting the solids -- they'll look like soft, toasted breadcrumbs -- is instructive. It will show you, beyond what any words can convey, what the components of butter's flavor are. There's a fresh-milk flavor in them. It's a great demonstration of what does and doesn't taste like this or that.

Home-cultured sour cream recipe

2008-01-11T13:23:00.000-06:00

For the creamiest, freshest-tasting sour cream you've ever had, just follow this simple method.

1 tablespoon home-cultured buttermilk (see my recipe in a separate post)
1 cup heavy cream

Pour the buttermilk into a heat-resistant glass jar. Add the cream.

Place the lid on the jar. Place the jar into a bowl or pot of warm tap water for several minutes, until the jar of buttermilk-to-be seems to be around room temperature. Remove the jar from the water and leave it on your kitchen counter. Every now and again, pick it up and give it a good shake-a-shake. The frequency of shaking is unimportant. It's fine to leave this unattended for many hours, like during sleep or if you go off to work.

After about 6–12 hours, you'll have sour cream. Refrigerate. This gets thicker and tastier over the course of the next couple of days.

After about a week, the flavor will begin to deteriorate. So don't let your lovely sour cream go to waste! Use this everywhere you might use commercial sour cream, or yogurt, whipped cream, mayonnaise, cottage cheese or (gag) Cool-Whip.

You can use store-bought buttermilk, also. It won't taste as good. But it's still a fun experiment!

As with all food, the better your ingredients, the better your results. Look for the best, freshest cream with the least amount of additive gunk. Organic and local if at all possible.

I just got this hint from a low-carb forum where I like to hang out: Organic Valley uses the seaweed-derived thickener carageenan in their ultra-pasteurized heavy cream, but not in their (non-ultra-)pasteurized heavy cream. I have nothing against carageenan itself. However, they make their darn cream too thick! I look forward to trying out their pasteurized cream (if I can find it) and seeing if that really is better. Pasteurized is better for you than ultra-p (more vitality remains), anyway.

Home-cultured buttermilk recipe

2008-01-11T12:59:00.002-06:00

This is a smooth, refreshing drink that’s really good for you, with lots of live, active culture. It’s also the basis of sour cream and quark, a soft cottage-cheese-like cheese popular in Germany. I'll post instructions for those separately.

Meantime, forgot any associations you might have with the nasty, salty, thin, tart taste of the storebought stuff. And get ready for a wholesome, luscious treat.

We started our buttermilk with powdered culture that we bought from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (cheesemaking.com). The package specified that the buttermilk produced from the powder could not be used to keep the buttermilk going batch after batch, but we've had ours going since 2006! It just keeps getting better and better.

You can also get your buttermilk started with a carton of ordinary supermarket buttermilk. We've recently experimented with it. It didn't taste nearly as good. But it's a start!

Ingredients:

1/4 cup buttermilk
2 quarts whole milk

Combine in a jar. Glass is best. Let set at room temperature for 6-12 hours, until clabbered. Refrigerate. Use within (I guess) two or three weeks.

Do not use more buttermilk than the above ratio. If you use more than 1/4 cup, the texture becomes grainy. If you use more than 1/2 cup, the flavor becomes harsh and sour.

To shave a couple of hours off the waiting time: set the jar of milk upright a sink full of hot water until the milk has come to about room temperature. This should take ten minutes or so.

To find out when the buttermilk is ready to refrigerate, shake the jar. A few minutes later, check to see if stripes have formed running down the glass. If so, it’s clabbered. It doesn’t have to be thick at this stage. It’ll thicken later, in the refrigerator.

Be sure to save 1/4 cup of buttermilk so you can keep the culture going!

Christmas dinner: A figgy pudding

2007-12-25T22:30:00.002-06:00

Figgy pudding

A few days ago, Donald said he wanted a figgy pudding -- like in the song, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." Neither of us had any idea what it was. It became a days-long research project! We found info in Wikipedia and even a YouTube video of a cooking demo, which seemed like it used the Wikibooks Cookbook recipe. For all I know, the demonstrator was the same guy who supplied the recipe.

All these sources -- and in fact, most of the sources I looked at -- ignored or were ignorant of what we learned was the central feature of figgy pudding.

More of this post coming up soon!

Christmas dinner: Roast duck with spinach and shallots

2007-12-25T21:55:00.001-06:00

Roast duck

We made some variations to the method given by Alton Brown on the "What's Up, Duck" episode from a few years back. A year or so ago, when we first made duck, we followed his instructions pretty much exactly. It's the only other time I recall ever having duck. Steaming and then roasting is a method that originated in China -- so I read in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Here's the five-step essence of Alton's instructions:

Thaw
Cut in quarters, reserving wings and backbone for later use
Brine and season 1.5 hours (he gives a pine-orange juice and fresh sage recipe)
Steam 45 minutes
Roast in a cast-iron pan that's been heated in the oven. (leg quarters first 10 minutes, then add breast quarters and roast another 10 or so)

This time we made some variations:

Thaw
Cut in seven pieces, reserving wings and backbone for later use
Rub with 2 tsp. salt, Italian seasoning and black pepper; fridge overnight
Steam 45 minutes
Roast in a steel (not stainless) restaurant-style frying pan that's been heated in the oven.

Delicious. I preferred this seasoning combo with the strong duck flavor over the pine-orange-sage that Alton recommended. Just a personal taste thing, I suppose, but I wanted to let the duck flavor speak for itself more. Especially since it's something I'm not familiar with. I got a much better sense this time of what duck is actually like.

We cut the duck in more pieces, because, really, who wants to sit down and eat 1/4 of a duck? Too much.

Spinach with shallots
Sauteed in the pan that we roasted the duck in. Simple. Marvelous.

Christmas 2007

2007-12-25T21:37:00.000-06:00

Christmas! Last night we put out cookies and buttermilk for Santa, in a Santa head mug. Also a pot of water on the floor for the reindeer. I never heard of that, but Donald said they did that when he was a kid. I got up later to empty the water except for a little, make the cup look like someone drank it, and arrange a convincing spray of crumbs and cookie shards on the plate. And put out the presents, of course. Forever, I've been arguing against introducing a Santa Claus myth. But now, the first Xmas he's old enough to be aware of Christmas and Santa, I dove headlong in. It was just too much fun to resist.

Ulysses's "big presents" from us were a Kidizoom camera and a motorized Hot Wheel track that shoots the car up around a loop-de-loop and around the track with enough force to get it back to the starting point, so it can loop around again. Donald found that went he went out for presents a few weeks ago. The New York Times featured the Kidizoom camera a few weeks ago; we bought it from Amazon, and a week later they were sold out -- scalpers were selling them for three times the retail price! I guess it's a hot toy. We like it because it's a fun toy that lets a kid be creative, rather than something with close-ended "learning games." Ulysses also loves it. He immediately began taking pictures of everything, including his breakfast. And holding it at arm's length to take pix of himself. Just like a real art student.

For breakfast, Don made his famous sourdough pancakes -- see his blog for many more details. He set the starter out overnight, so it was all super-healthful fermented grain. What amazing, complex flavor. And so light and fluffy. Served with Wisconsin pure maple syrup.

For lunch, we had long spaghetti with Newman's marinara, fortified with local Usinger's Italian sausage and sautee onions and red peppers. Spaghetti might not sound so special, but in the context of our low-carb regimen that we've been following since March, it was a special treat! The same goes for the pancake breakfast.

Christmas dinner: see separate post.

Adorable Christmas anecdotes

2007-12-23T15:34:00.001-06:00

We put up our tree and holiday decorations for the first time since Ulysses was born. He is just bubbling over with cuteness over it.

***

Yesterday, as Donald was clearing space for the tree, I brought out a Little Golden Book that we've had for years, Baby's Christmas, and started leafing through it with Ulysses. I pointed to a picture of the jolly old man in red.

"Do you know who that is?" I asked.

Ulysses nodded and smiled. "Candy Claus!" he said.

***

I showed U the box that the Christmas tree was in. "Christmas tree!" he said. It's the same box the tree came in, so it has plenty of pictures and descriptions of the contents. A six foot tree. We got it at Target in the mid-1990s, the first or second year the store was open there on Lien Road, on the site of the old Lien farm -- barn and all stood there, within city limits, right up until that time.

I opened the box and we took out the sections of tree together. We fitted together the stand and the three sections of tree. I began fluffing out the branches, which have to be pressed together to fit in the box.

"Christmas tree," Ulysses said, watching me work. "I'm happy."

"You're happy?" I said.

"Yes," he replied, nodding. Smiling. "I'm happy."

***

At first, Ulysses didn't like it when he saw Donald was clearing off his train table, packing up his wooden tracks and bridges, boxing up his toy trains. When he realized Donald was emptying that corner of the living room of U's toys, he jumped out of his chair and ran over in a panic.

"It's OK, Ulysses," said Don, "We're making space for a Christmas tree!"

"We're having Christmas," I said.

"We're putting up the tree for Santa," said Don. "He's coming with presents!"

Ulysses begin to cry. "No! Don't do that! No touch!" It was clear that he didn't get it. And he didn't want to listen anything we had to say about it, either. His voice rose to a scream. "No!"

"Abort mission!" I told Don. "We'll pick it up again later."

But Don wasn't ready to give up. "I'm going to get the Christmas train from the closet," he told Ulysses. He headed towards the office. Ulysses continued to protest. "No, Tata! Mama! No!"

The Christmas train is a toy Donald and I bought at least ten years ago. Maybe it was the same year we bought the tree. It's decked out holiday style; it plays loud, electronic carols; instead of coal, the car behind the engine brims with presents. Every year before U was born, we had set up the track to circle the tree.

Earlier this year, U noticed it -- in its original box -- high on a shelf in the office. Just a corner of the packaging was visible, but it was enough for train-crazy Ulysses to recognize it as a train, a fun, colorful train, that for some reason we weren't allowing him to play with. "That's for Christmas," we would say. Every once in a while, he would head to that closet, or simply point towards it from wherever in the house he happened to be. And beseech whichever of us was around: "Train! That train!"

It had been months since he had mentioned it.

I watched U's face as Donald walked into the office and turned towards the closet. I wanted to see if he would figure it out. He did, while Donald was still out of sight. It was a terrific payoff.

His brows were knit together and his mouth was pursed in a frown. Then all at once, his brows shot up, his eyes went wide, his jaw dropped. Just as suddenly, his face lit up in a smile.

It was finally happening! The forbidden train! It was coming out!

Donald emerged carrying the train box. He set it down near Ulysses. He went back to work clearing the toys and trains and train table from the Christmas tree corner.

He got no complaints.

Eight glasses of water myth

2007-12-23T08:55:00.004-06:00

Several years ago I found an article online about a researcher who debunked the eight glasses myth. Since then, I've tried and tried to find it again. Finally, here's a reference to it!

From the Web site of the British Medical Journal, a publication of the British Medical Association:

Revealed: The seven great "medical myths"
Fri Dec 21, 2007 10:19am ET

An excerpt of the article:

People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day

The advice to drink at least eight glasses of water a day can be found throughout the popular press.w1-w4 One origin may be a 1945 recommendation that stated: A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 litres daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 millilitre for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.w5 If the last, crucial sentence is ignored, the statement could be interpreted as instruction to drink eight glasses of water a day.w6

Another endorsement may have come from a prominent nutritionist, Frederick Stare, who once recommended, without references, the consumption "around 6 to 8 glasses per 24 hours," which could be "in the form of coffee, tea, milk, soft drinks, beer, etc."w7

The complete lack of evidence supporting the recommendation to drink six to eight glasses of water a day is exhaustively catalogued in an invited review by Heinz Valtin in the American Journal of Physiology.w8 Furthermore, existing studies suggest that adequate fluid intake is usually met through typical daily consumption of juice, milk, and even caffeinated drinks.w9 In contrast, drinking excess amounts of water can be dangerous, resulting in water intoxication, hyponatraemia, and even death.

I thought the fourth bro was Zeppo?

2007-12-16T17:37:00.001-06:00

Get this. I made a spontaneous joke at work and the punchline was "Marxist."

Everyone laughed except a (college grad) 25-year-old woman who said she had never heard that word.

People said, "You know, like Karl Marx?"

"Karl who?" she said.

Long white beard? Changed the face of planet earth? One of the two or three most influential people over the last 150 years? In response to which the entire foreign policy of America and much of the domestic policy revolved for most of the second half of the 20th century?"

She had no idea. NO IDEA! Who we were talking about. It should go without saying that how anyone in the room felt about Marx one way or the other is irrelevant -- in fact, it didn't come up. The point is, how can an American adult be this blasted ignorant about something that important?

When we were in the trying-to-jog-her-memory phase, I said, "You know, like Lenin?"

"Well, I've heard of him!" she answered, a little hotly. Defiantly.

"Not John Lennon," I said.

Everyone laughed. She didn't say anything. To this day, no one knows whether or not she truly had been thinking of John Lennon at that moment.

The iPhone Musical

2007-12-06T18:44:00.001-06:00

Our TiVo picked this up back when it originally played last summer. I greenlighted it because Ulysses loves it so much.

We hadn't watched it for months. Then, yesterday, our copy of Readers' Digest came in mail. On the cover is an iPhone-like gadget, equipped with cartoon devil horns and tail -- to show that all this technology and connection is bad, bad, bad. Ulysses recognized it as an iPhone.

It's the first brand name I've ever heard him use.

The only place he's seen one is in the pictures within The iPhone Musical. So we flipped to the video and watched it over and over and over last night, and this morning, Ulysses joyously singing along, and mimicking Pogue's moves.

All very cute. Even the part when U broke down into earnest, quiet tears when he realized that we don't have an actual iPhone. I told him, "iPhones are just in the song!" and that seemed to cheer him up. I know that method's not going to last much longer. I sure am glad he doesn't see commercials! (Thanks, TiVo. And DVD.)

Favorite bits for singing along to:

When the kayaker shouts, "What the...!"
When Pogue sings, "But God! This thing is sweet!"
When the wavy-haired singing guy says, "Cool!" with his thumbs up
When Pogue's voice is distorted while he sings, "AT&T"

When U was younger -- this summer, that is -- he also loved these parts:

When Pogue drives off in the car (U'd say, "Beep! Beep!")
When Pogue looks at the store display of batteries (U'd cheer, "Barries!" recognizing them as those wonderful things that make toys go.)