Cake and Cancer

 This morning, after a late a night necessitated by a fantastic Fourth of July party and some really, really good tequila, I came down the hallway to find that my bins of Christmas decorations had vomited their contents all over the living room.  Jack, always the early riser, had decided that Christmas would be much more fun if we celebrated it more often and hefted all the stuff he would need out of the downstairs closet.  I had gone to bed last night after doing a load of dishes and saving the rest of the mess(which was considerable) for the morning, after the tequila had worn off and the coffee had kicked in, so I was not immediately pleased to find that, in addition to our American flag decorations, there was now Christmas stuff EVERYWHERE.  My first impulse was to be grumpy, but I quickly realized I couldn't afford to get grumpy until I'd had some coffee and by that time Jack had explained his plan to me. 

He'd wanted to make Christmas for Matteas.  He made a fake tree out of some scrapbook paper, set up a circle of wooden train track around it, and wrapped a present for Matteas which turned out to be some of Jack's Easter egg hunt money in a shoe box.  Jack is a piece of work, but he is also the cutest.  He is also, as my cousin Kayleigh says, my ultimate "teacher bird."  Birds are a theme in Kayleigh's life, and teacher bird is the term she came up with for a person that comes into your life to teach you something that you need to learn.  Jack has taught me a lot of things, and lately he has really been emphasizing to me what a mixed bag life is. 

My sister told me she pulled up my blog to show a(very proper, non-profanity using) friend my beautiful cakes.  Instead of beautiful cake, what she found was "fuck fuck fuckety FUCK."  Ahem.

I would prefer my life to be neatly organized, but much of the time it isn't and I cause myself a lot of needless suffering by comparing my life as it is to my life as I think it should be.  I think my life should be fabulous parties followed by beautiful cakes, and no one would ever make a mess and definitely no one would ever get cancer.  As a young mother, my life often felt either/or: I was either under-slept(mostly this one) or well-rested; my house was either clean or(more often) it was messy.  I'm finding more and more that the either/or game is a hard way to live life, because either/or is not how life plays.  It's not either cake or cancer, it's cake AND cancer.  Life doesn't look at what you have going on and say "Oh, hang on: someone you care about has cancer so I'm going to go ahead and hit the Pause button while you deal with this gracefully.  Take all the time you need, nothing else will happen while you're having your moment."  So I apologize for the occasional profanity, but it's where I need to be right now.  I occasionally make beautiful cakes, and occasionally someone I love has cancer and there is not always a neat separation between the meat and the mess of my life.  And by "meat" I mean "the good part."  I sometimes have trouble being open to joy when I'm in the middle of suffering, but over and over again I feel myself being stretched to take it all in, not joy or suffering, but joy AND suffering, all of it at once and together.

Matteas is better at practicing this lesson than I am, as demonstrated by his ability to fully enjoy the pleasure of his ice cream cone while not being bothered by the one inch gash above his eyebrow.  You probably can't see it very well in that picture because it's all scabbed up now, no thanks to the special glue the lady at the clinic used instead of actual stitches. 

All that is to say in a disclaimer sort of way that if you come here looking for cake, you'll find some but there will most certainly be some fuckfuckfucketyFUCK along the way.  Because sometimes cake and cancer happen on the same day.

A Little Food-crazy

The other day, I remembered that I have a blog.  A sad, lonely, neglected little blog.  There's a lot going on and it felt like too much work to explain all the pieces here, but I think I may have found a way to connect my real life with my blogging life without over-sharing. 

To no one's surprise, that connection is food.

It all started with a lump that my mother-in-law found in her right breast.  Tests followed, with days of anxious waiting and then the confirmation no one wanted to hear.

Cancer.

Fuck fuck fuckety.  FUCK.

She had a mastectomy on Wednesday and is recovering with miraculous speed and ease.  Her oncologist told her that she's going to live another twenty years at least.  Her doctor prescribed a special diet which focuses on removing inflammatory foods and boosting consumption of anti-inflammatory foods, so I've had food on the brain even more than usual.  While the diet she's on isn't necessarily an official Paleo diet, the Paleo food philosophy lines up with the whole anti-inflammatory prescription.  A friend told her about the blog nomnompaleo, which has been a useful and entertaining recipe resource.  On Sunday, I spent about three hours reading that blog.

Then Tristan found this TED talk, which I've been watching on repeat.  All of this information has led to a minor existential crisis for me, both because I have to deal with the fact that my sons' Grandma is mortal and I feel mildly panicked at the thought of ever making another wedding/birthday/baby shower cake.  The main problem is sugar.  Eating sugar raises insulin levels.  It is literally insulin's job to stabilize blood sugar levels, and it does this by pulling sugar out of the bloodstream and into fat cells.  In other words, fat isn't necessarily made of fat, it's made of sugar(or wheat or corn or rice).  Insulin also triggers a process called angiogenesis(the growth of new blood vessels).  Cancer cannot survive without angiogenesis.  The really cool thing is that there are lots and lots of foods which are anti-angiogenic, and they are the sort of thing you might expect: berries, vegetables, tomato sauce, green tea.  Know what's not on the list?  Grains.  Of any sort.  Not even whole grains.  This is very bad  news for General Mills.  Metabolically, eating grains(and simple starches like potatoes, corn and rice) has the same effect on the body's insulin levels as eating sugar: insulin levels go up.

Now look at the staple food crops of America: corn, wheat, rice, potatoes; notice a theme?  Now when I look at those foods, all I can see is "inflammation, inflammation, inflammation."  I'm not saying that if you eat sugar or grain you're going to get cancer, or that if you stop eating those things you won't get cancer.  But I can't help but think of the nutrient opportunities each meal provides, and asking myself how I want to spend those opportunities.  Nutritionally, grains don't have a whole lot to offer.  I'd rather eat some pastured meat, lots of vegetables, maybe some roasted sweet potatoes.  Cherries and blueberries make a delicious dessert.  As a major benefit, if I skip the grains and simple starches I can eat an astonishing volume of food without feeling uncomfortably full.

I've already committed to three wedding cakes between now and September and I will craft them with love and enthusiasm, but I have this crazy idea; what if instead of cake, we started a tradition of, say, roasted free-range chicken with an assortment of roasted vegetables?  Why shouldn't the symbolic first food the bride and groom feed each other be about a commitment to be healthy and delicious, not just non-nutritionally sweet?  I realize the obvious setbacks to this proposal, but it still appeals to me. 

For now, I plan on spending more time in this space and trying to curb my food fanaticism just a little.  Refining my food philosophy, feeding my family well, and sharing the recipes here.

Getting More Involved

 The boys helped make dinner tonight.  Jack wanted to try making salad, so he picked some spinach from the garden, juiced a lemon for dressing and asked me to cut up some almonds he'd gotten out.  He ended up not really grooving on it, but I added it to the big bowl of arugula salad with lemon vinaigrette and Parmesan that Aaron and I were eating, and as it turns out the almonds were delicious.  I told Jack that I loved the combination, and he was pleased to have contributed something. 

When Matteas saw Jack juicing a lemon, he was desperate to juice something as well so Jack suggested I let him make orange juice.  Normally I get really OCD about messy kid experiments right before dinner, but I think all the sunshine today made me a little more laid back than usual so I said yes and gave Matteas a bowl.  He did his best, and I helped him squeeze the last drops of juice out of his mangled orange.  Then Jack juiced another orange and I had Matteas help me strain the pulp.  Next, we added the juice from the fruit salad I'd made the boys for lunch and topped it off with a little blood orange soda for added fizz.  The boys were so pleased with their efforts and were chatting away the whole time, Matteas' voice shaking with excitement as he hatched a brilliant plan: "Jack, you can make a salad while I make the juice, and then we can share the food and have a party!"  This was a particularly amusing plan to me because neither of the boys like salad, but I encouraged them in their communal sentiments. 

Because we were feeling fancy, we poured the juice into champagne flutes and lit candles, which I had the boys pick out at the store earlier this week.  We had a family toast, and the boys pronounced the evening the Best Dinner Ever.  I need to come up with more ways to authentically involve them in meal preparation, not just give them mushrooms and butter knives whenever they want to 'help.' 

We also planted a whole bunch of seeds before dinner, and we're going to make charts to keep track of how long it takes before they sprout.  Because everything is more official when you make a chart.

A Baby Shower Cake

 I am getting around.  In a cake baking kind of way, that is.  A friend of a friend is being thrown a fancy baby shower today, and I got to make the cake.  I lost a little of my enthusiasm as I was whipping up a batch of frosting at 9 p.m. last night, knowing I would be frosting into the wee hours.  As the cake started coming together I got more and more excited, and when I was finished with the rows of tiny dots I almost woke up Aaron so he could admire it in real time.  I decided he could wait until this morning, and as a testament to my cake obsession I woke up at 7 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep.  I never wake up at 7 a.m., or have trouble going back to sleep.  Generally speaking, 7 a.m. and I are strangers. 

I blame the flowers.  I bought some beautiful baby blue hydrangeas yesterday and congratulated myself for getting the flowers a day ahead of time, but it was warm and by the time I got them home the poor hydrangeas had wilted.  So I got up early this morning, had coffee with Aaron and then went to not one but two stores in search of suitable gilding.  Hydrangeas aren't really in season, so I got roses and gerbera daisies with some pale green (scarce)hydrangeas for accent. 

Because it's important to see these things from all angles.

Look!  Cute dots!

I love the brown centers of these daisies.

From the top.

And now I want to make myself a wedding cake.

I can sort of understand the appeal of flowers made from frosting in that the end result is an entirely edible cake, but I think real flowers are so much lovelier.  Plus it's not that much work to take a rose or two off your slice of cake before eating it.  I am now fantasizing about having my own bakery and making cupcakes that are each topped with a single baby rose, you know those tiny ones sold in three-dozen bunches?  I'd top the vanilla frosted cupcakes with a tiny red rose, and the chocolate frosted cupcakes with a pale pink rose.  Then I'd probably have to make some robin's egg colored frosted cupcakes and top them with orange roses...

Also, I finished this cake a full five hours before delivery time.  I'm getting almost professional.

Harvest

Matteas helped me plant these seeds, carefully tracing his finger in the soft dirt to make a trench, mindfully sprinkling in the seeds, then gently covering them like he was tucking very small children into an earthy bed.  He is also a faithful little waterer, and as the spinach and lettuce have come leaping out of the ground he declared "Look mama!  It's because I did such good watering!"  Last night we had a salad, all the greens for which came from our own garden.  Matteas desperately wanted to help me cut the arugula, and when we came to a baby leaf he begged me not to cut it. 

He finds it easier to collect eggs, now that he understands there is no chance that any of them contain a baby chicken.  This morning we slipped on our boots and headed out to the chicken coop together, and he let out a yell of joy when he saw four brown eggs nestled among the wood chips in the milk crate we use as a nesting box.  I love that gathering eggs is something we do every single morning, but it hasn't lost its magic for Matteas.  Or me.  There is something mystical about picking up a still-warm egg in the early morning sunshine, the way the curve of it fits perfectly into the palm of your hand, the satisfying weight of it.  I love that we can get breakfast from our own back yard, literally.  We haven't bought eggs in months, we just use our own eggs when we have them and go eggless when we don't, which doesn't really happen.  We get at least three eggs every day, and during a week when the boys are interested in other things for breakfast it doesn't take long to accumulate a dozen.  And that's how we know it's time for cake.

Some Kind of Recovery

 I was talking to someone the other day and somehow, drawing came up.  Everyone who knows me is aware of my passion for food, but there are other things about me that have fallen by the wayside since having kids.  I felt a tiny prick of grief when I realized that drawing is no longer a part of my life to the extent that someone would be surprised to know that I ever did it.  And, not for the first time, I took a look at my life and asked myself, when the f*** did that happen?

 As a teenager, drawing was a way to stay sane.  Alone in my room, I could say whatever I wanted to say in a language of my choosing.  This is a drawing I did of a paperback cover for Fahrenheit 451, but for the pages of "armor" I chose my own texts and kept a running list of authors as I worked on it.  I started this when I was 17.  Eleven years ago.  When I pulled out my tablet this morning, I found an expired moth among the pages.  A place I used to go on a regular basis has become such a ghost town that living things go there to die.

Oh dear.

It took four years, but we finally finished the master bedroom.  Noticing that we had an "extra" room on our hands, I decided to jam my drafting table into it.  It was kind of a disaster and Aaron eventually came home and fixed it, but the point is that now I have an established space to get all dramatic and creative again.  I'm curious to see what will come out of me now that I'm not driven by huge amounts of teenaged angst; then again, I've got plenty of parenting angst, but somehow that particular brand feels less artsy.  Perhaps if I stop locking myself in the bathroom with chocolate, I might actually finish a drawing.

Thirty schmirty

Birthday Menu

Wedge salad with apples, blue cheese and balsamic vinaigrette -Dave
Pistachio chicken with a mustard cream sauce -Aaron
Grilled green and white asparagus with duck egg -Albert
Wild rice with sauteed mushrooms -Aaron
Caramelized apple bread pudding with boozy raisins -Aaron

 Today, I turned 28.  When I was little, 28 seemed quite aged to me; approaching antiquity, even.  I imagined that by the time I had achieved such lifespan as this that I would have rescued half of Africa from starvation, written three great American novels, cured cancer, and met at least half of the important people in the world because they wanted to tell me how much they admired my paintings.

 I haven't done any of those things. 

What I have done is cultivated a number of relationships with people of such fine quality that they enhance my life in inumerable ways, people I have loved, laughed and lived with.  People who love me enough to make me dinner, and raise a glass to me on my birthday.

 

 (we are blurry, but we are having a fabulous time.)

I have also learned some really valuable lessons on what it feels like to be myself.  I used to imagine that I would have to do a lot of things in my life to be happy, and sometimes that's been true; I love to plant things in the dirt, to make my boys laugh, to put flowers on the table and make my home a beautiful living space.  Other times, the most vital thing had nothing to do with doing: breathing through the contractions that brought my babies into this world, weeping at my brother's grave, lying next to my husband at night. 

At my party, almost no one knew how old I was.  It's never really mattered to me; I haven't ever really felt any particular age.  When I was younger I didn't like for people to know my age because in one way or another, it didn't seem to match their expectation: my vocabulary made me sound older; I looked way too young to have kids; always there was some disparity.  I felt it in myself, too; I was never quite at home with any particular number. 

Now I feel quite at home, but it has nothing to do with numbers.  Age is just one way to frame a person, but it really doesn't tell you anything about them.  I have met some infants who seem like old souls, and I've met senior citizens who are young at heart, and all sorts of people in between and most of the time, when I look at the people I know, I don't think of a number.  What I think of is what that person means to me, and what I mean to them.   

That being said, I will probably still freak out a little bit when I turn 30.  Still, it's hard to mind getting older(and yes, I know I'm not really "older") when I can look around the table and see a crowd of people I want to spend the rest of my life with.