That Was Fast

Today, Matteas turned four.  My baby is four years old.  Somehow it feels like he can't possibly be that old, even though it seems like he's been part of my life forever.  I have to try really hard to think about what it felt like not to be his mom.  I think that's partly due to the fact that in many ways, my 28 year-old self doesn't feel all that different to me than my 17 year-old self.  A little less dramatic maybe, more sure of who I am, but basically the same personality.  For the same reason I sometimes feel a little panicked that I am responsible for two whole children; some days I feel so young, I feel like I still need a mother.

It has been so much fun to watch Matteas develop his personality.  There is never a dull moment with this boy; he is always sharing his boundless knowledge with anyone who will listen, following the neighbors around as they water the grass and get the mail, making sure they get their daily dose of Matteas Wisdom.  I love this about him.  He had such a sweet personality as a baby and is still very sweet most days, but somewhere in his third year he turned a corner and became really challenging.  One of my least favorite parts of parenting is how unpredictable it is, because I'm the sort of person who likes to have a plan.  If I have a plan, I know what to do.  I don't like not knowing what to do, but my kids are really good at teaching me over and over again to let go of my expectations, to roll with the punches.  Lately, Matteas has been the more challenging child to parent.  I never thought I would say that, but there it is.  He is so, so stubborn and will NOT admit when he's wrong(I have no idea where he gets this).  I've been feeling kind of weepy about him getting older, I think because I enjoyed him so much as a baby.  With Jack, I couldn't wait for his infancy to be over; he was so angry about being an infant, and the older he got the happier he got.  Plus he was so tiny when he was born and wouldn't nurse, and pumping two bottles a night really taxed my sanity. 

But Matteas was different.  Quiet and sweet from birth, he took long naps during the day and nursed with ease.  He slept better than Jack did, and seemed quite content to be whatever age he happened to be at the time.  He loved to chat, and would sometimes smile so hard during a "conversation" that his big brown eyes would turn into little half-moon slits that almost disappeared into his enormous grin.  He was, and still is, a boy who loves life and relationship.  Until him, I didn't know that a baby could be so satisfying.  So I'm kind of bummed that we seem to be getting to the hard part of our relationship.

Speaking of unpredictable, we haven't had a party for Matteas yet because Jack has had a fever since Thursday.  Today was his first day of not running a temperature and trying to get warm through fits of chills, so we had a quiet dinner at home and then took the boys out for ice cream cones.  We ended up eating them in the parking lot because the ice cream place was so stinkin' hot inside.  For presents, we got him a scooter(which he's had his eye on for a while) and: a popcorn popper.  Yes, he actually asked for one.  I have a feeling he's going to feel so empowered that we will be eating popcorn for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The Trouble with Red Velvet

 I'm  not a fan of dye or artificial ingredients, so when I was asked to make a red velvet wedding cake I was determined to do it naturally.  The baking frenzy that ensued was the most obsessive cooking endeavor I've ever been involved with, and included the boiling, roasting, pureeing and reducing of many many pounds of cooked beets.  I won't lie; it got ugly. 

 I baked between two and five sample cakes a day, a single-layer eight inch round, auditioning different recipes and trying different tricks between crazy amounts of googling.  I have read everything ever published on the internet about red velvet cake.  The results were mostly cakes that were decidedly neither red nor velvety, and the only one I succeeded in keeping red tasted like borscht. 

 The problem is pH.  Baked goods that are red are acidic; baking soda, the main leavening agent in baked goods, is alkaline.  An alkaline cake = brown cake.  I tried and tried and tried: I added more acid, left out the baking soda, reduced the beets for longer, added tons of lemon juice directly to the beets.  I'd end up most times with a beautifully scarlet batter, but 30 minutes later I'd pull a brown cake out of the oven. 

 I finally gave in and bought red dye, then baked off the wedding cake, wrapped it and froze it.  Then proceeded to have nightmares about how brown the cake still was, and woke up with a conviction: I'm not proud of that cake. 

So I started again.

 In all, I baked 27 layers of cake over the course of four days.  The final result, while brown on the outside, was a satisfying ruby red on the inside thanks to the four jars of red gel dye I used.

 It was an interesting lesson in delivering a product I was not, in an ultimate sense, proud of.  I don't believe in sacrificing flavor for visual presentation, and the nature of red velvet cake is such that only a minimal amount of cocoa powder can be used without turning the whole thing brown.  In my rebellion, I added extra vanilla, lemon zest and a pinch of cinnamon.  I'm not going to bother putting up the recipe, because taste-wise it was unremarkable.  I realized the next day that when I scaled up the recipe I finally settled on after dozens of changes and substitutions, I forgot to scale up the amount sour cream I used and the final cake came out a little dry.  I got lots of feedback about the frosting, which confirmed my belief that cake is really just a vehicle for frosting.  I hate that about cake. 

Flowers by Maureen Arpin

I'm not sure what I'll do if I'm asked to make another red velvet cake.  I understand the appeal of a jewel-red cake visually, but the flavor trade off still troubles me on a deeply spiritual level.  Pleasure should be about pleasure, and when all is said and done I'd rather eat an ugly tasty cake than a beautiful flavorless one.  That's what troubles me about this wedding cake; it failed to maximize the opportunity for pleasure, something I feel confident my previous wedding cakes accomplished.  

Still, it was an interesting experience to add to my cake baking evolution.  I look back at some of the cakes I've made and cringe with embarrassment that I served them in public, but I realize that I had to make those first, lumpy cakes to get to the smooth, sleek ones.  Because I'm all about growth.

A Few Rash Decisions and a Good Vacation

 A million years ago, when I was pregnant with Matteas, I tried contacts.  With no success.  So I'm trying them again because even after 13 years I'm not used to my glasses, and I hate them every day.  It's kind of working.  I don't hate them as much as I did the first time, and my optometrist saw fit to order me six months worth of contacts because he assures me that I'll eventually get used to them, and because his whole face lifts a visible inch when he smiles I'm choosing to believe him. 

But it's weird, because I've worn glasses for such a long time and now my face looks so naked, and my eyes look so small and my lips are enormous so I thought I'd level the playing field a bit and cut some bangs.  And now I have no idea what I look like: bangs, no bangs, glasses, no glasses?  What does anyone look like, anyway, and what does it matter?  Cue existential crisis.  But during all this we went to Whidbey Island, and it was magical.

 This is as normal as it gets.  I have over ten of these; Matteas will not make a normal face in any of them.  I'm not really sure what his deal is right now, because for once in his life he is being The More Difficult Child and this is new for everyone.

Our last night there, I asked my cousin Christopher to make a bonfire so we could have Cousins Bonfire, and he was all over it.  We drank cheap wine and watched the crazy half moon get eaten by the mountains, and it was epic. 

Warmer Days

 It never fails to impress that, while we've had some excellent parties that involved careful planning and extensive preparation, some of our most magical dinners have happened spontaneously.  You can't plan on making the kids climb up into an apple tree to eat their dinner at sunset; these things need to happen naturally.

 Anna's back yard is a lovely place for an outdoor party.

 After dinner, the kids kept each other entertained on the swing while the grown ups finished their wine and the sun sank lower, and for a few hours life felt magical and safe and lovely.

As I type this, Matteas is walking around naked and crying because the gingerbread man tatttoo he wanted got ripped because he didn't know how to put it on and wouldn't let Jack help him, and Jack is being domineering and bossy about how Matteas should have let him help.  Also, it's raining which makes me extra pleased that we ate crab and drank wine in the back yard last night.  Carpe diem. 

Crab and Cancer

The theme continues.

Tomorrow my mother in-law gets the results of extensive tests to see if her cancer has spread; her oncologist doesn't sound terribly optimistic.  Again again I say to you, fuck fuck fuckety fuck. 

However, the spectre of potential bad news didn't keep us from having a mighty fine evening anyway, and we enjoyed cold wine, buttery crab, garlicky Ceasar and flank steak with chimichuri in the back yard.  It occurred to me that regardless of the test results, there wasn't anywhere else I'd rather have been.

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.