Salad bar, that is.
I figure I can’t be the only busy mom whose children eat a more healthy diet than she does. I’m always cutting up fruit for them, or telling them to eat some carrots or a banana, but when I’m the one in need of a snack, well, I really really like cookies.
The kids are always singing the fruit-and-veggie song from Signing Time (“Any way you slice it, or dice it, or peel it, it’s gotta add up to five a day”) and this has made me sheepishly aware of how often I fall short of the mark. I know, it’s pathetic, and I ought to be embarrassed to post it here. But like I said, I’m operating under the assumption that I’m not the only one. Please don’t disillusion me. I know you’re out there somewhere, Cookie-Loving Mother Who Hates Chopping Vegetables.
Anyway, I had this brilliant idea (she says modestly). One nice big salad a day can take care of all five servings (and then some) in a fell swoop. (Don’t worry, that’s not the brilliant idea—that’s pedestrian statement of the obvious.) Why don’t I eat more salads, I wondered?
Two reasons.
1) Laziness.
2) Boredom.
Regarding the latter reason, I realized that I always enjoy salads in restaurants (on the rare occasions on which we dine in one) because they include such yummy tidbits. Pine nuts, sunflower seeds, almonds, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries, real bleu cheese. Well, duh, nothing’s stopping me from doing this at home. Just hadn’t occurred to me before.
So I picked up a few of these items and began sprinkling them on spinach salads at home. Yum. Seriously. I’ll eat a giant bowlful of raw spinach just for the sake of a few mandarin oranges. For about a week after I had the Fancy Salads Are Yummy insight, I ate a really delicious and large spinach salad every day. In my convert’s zeal, I gleefully chopped red bell pepper and mushrooms and carrots and other veggies for these princely salads, these superheroes of salads, these I’ll-see-your-five-a-day-and-raise-it salads.
And then Reason #1 reared its very ugly head. All that chopping. All those little bags and containers to take out and put away. All that digging around in the pantry for the precious baggie of dried cherries I found on sale. Too much fuss! Too much assembly required! Cookies come pre-assembled, whispered the voice of sloth in my head. And no mess to clean up afterward…
Which is when the brilliant idea occurred. Maybe it will only seem brilliant to you if you are as culinarily lazy as I am. Maybe it will only further convince you that I am the most pathetic fool ever to set foot in a kitchen. There are those who would agree with you. You know who you are.
Anyway. What I did was to put all my salad fixings in a plastic bin. Boom, one-stop shopping. It’s right there at eye level on the fridge shelf, where I can’t avoid seeing it. Big bag of prewashed spinach sitting on top. In the bin are all the little baggies and plastic containers that I was finding it such a burden to collect from various points in the pantry and refrigerator. Pine nuts, sunflower seeds, almonds, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries, real bleu cheese…mmm, just cutting-and-pasting this list from above makes me hungry. (They don’t all make it into every salad, of course, just a random selection. Otherwise there’d be no room for the veggies, which are, of course, the whole point.)
Also in the bin: sliced mushrooms, diced bell peppers, chopped carrots. OK, so it’s not a perfect system: I still have to prep the veggies. But (another duh moment) I’m doing it once or twice a week, at night after the kids are in bed. Then in the middle of my busy day, I can scoop a handful of diced peppers out of a baggie and throw it on my beeyootiful salad. I know, lots of people have thought of this before me. I don’t claim to be innovative. Except possibly in the matter of sticking it all in a bin together so all I have to do is pull the bin out of the fridge and mix-and-match until I’ve got a bowlful.
I am so delighted at the success of my new system that I think I’ll go celebrate with some cookies.
I don’t have time to write much in the way of a blog entry today, so I’m just going to post a list.
Things on My Nightstand (Which Is Technically Not a Nightstand, But Rather a Barstool Standing Beside the Bed):
• A lamp
• A baby monitor
• A small bottle of contact lens rewetting drops (mine)
• A small bottle of Burt’s Bees Milk & Honey lotion (not mine)
• A yellow plastic frog
• A copy of Mossflower by Brian Jacques
• A copy of Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Unset
• Several thousand dollars in Monopoly money
Hmm. Writing this list has given me a flashback. Ninth grade English class. Assignment: write a description of your bedroom. We had to read our descriptions aloud and I remember being puzzled when my classmates laughed at several points during my reading. Not in a mean way, just in an amused way; but I hadn’t intended to be funny and so it confused me that they thought it was. Looking back on it, recalling what I can of my description, I can see now why they laughed. There was something about the yellow walls glowing like sunlight above the grass-green carpet, the "fourteen crumpled pieces of paper from failed attempts at writing a poem" (I remember that phrase exactly because it jumps into my head whenever I toss a crumpled paper toward a trash can and miss), and a bit about melted crayons in the overhead light fixture because my bedroom had formerly belonged to my younger sisters who had bunk beds.
Funny how the only parts I remember twenty-plus years later are the parts people found odd enough to laugh at. Just as the interesting (to me) parts of my nightstand list are the frog and the Monopoly money. (I’m still wondering how they got there, and whether they were part of a single game/event or were brought to this place separately, perhaps by different children. I could ask, but there’s more ‘scope for imagination’ in not knowing for sure.)
So much for my just writing a list.
I was cleaning the bathroom this morning when Jane came in to ask me how to pronounce the word "usurp." She had seen it in print a number of times but wasn’t sure how to say it. I told her, and then Rose wanted to know what it meant. So I gave some examples, including: "Or let’s say you’re sitting on my lap and I send you to get a tissue, and while you’re up, one of your sisters climbs in your place."
Rose started to giggle. "A usurper!"
Jane wandered back out with her book. Then Beanie came in and perched beside Rose on the edge of the tub while I wiped down the sink. Bean’s hair was wild; it hadn’t been brushed yet. I sent her to get her hairbrush and when she returned, I sat down on the tub’s rim to tackle her curls.
"Hey!" Bean cried indignantly. "You took my spot!"
Rose cackled. "You usurped, Mommy! You’re a usurper!"
"What’s that?" asked Beanie. Rose explained.
Bean pondered. "I think," she said, "that when a mommy surps, it’s okay."
"U-surp," Rose corrected.
Beanie was puzzled. "No I didn’t. Mommy surped."
"No, U-surp!" Rose insisted.
"I surp? But I didn’t! Mommy did!"
By this point I was choking with laughter. Beanie took my paroxysms for some kind of dismay.
"It’s okay, mommy, I don’t mind when you surp me."
"U-surp!" proclaimed Rose.
Beanie stared at her in disgust. "That’s what I SAID." She humphed out of the room before Rose could get in the last word. I sat there howling. Sorry, Abbott and Costello. Your place in my heart has been surped.
There’s more unscrambling of states going on in our house today…we stumbled upon this cool U.S. map puzzle at Jungle Arcade. Random states fall down the right side of your screen, and you drag them into their correct places on the map, racing to be as fast as possible.
Rose keeps beating me!
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that Jane and I went on a “Tree Walk” at our favorite local nature center. The husband-and-wife team who led the walk opened by reading a passage from their favorite book about trees. I was so enchanted by this bit of writing that I spent a long-hoarded gift certificate on a copy of the book, Donald Culross Peattie’s A Natural History of Trees
. (I believe he has written a Western North America version as well.)
Here’s the passage, taken from Peattie’s introduction:
Wherever you live, wherever you tramp or travel, the trees of our country are wondrously companionable, if you have a speaking acquaintance with them. When you have learned their names, they say them back to you, as you encounter them—and very much more, for they speak of your own past experience among them, and of our nation’s forest life.
Jane and I recalled these words as we hiked along a wooded path on the fringes of our neighborhood the other day—recalled them somewhat haphazardly, above the strained rattle of Wonderboy’s stroller. A friend of mine gave me a stroller her kids had outgrown, an amazingly rugged jogging stroller, the mountain bike of strollers, the Ahnold of strollers. She bought it in New Zealand, where they take their hiking seriously. I waited impatiently through the winter, eager to take this Strollinator out for a spin. I stocked its basket (which is approximately the size of a Volkswagen) with water bottles, a blanket, diapers, sketchbooks, paint sets. Nature walks, here we come.
Unfortunately it turned out that Robostroller had a flat. We discovered this about halfway down the driveway on the morning I’m talking about, the morning of our first big nature hike of the season. Hastily we formulated a backup plan. The Incredible Hulk of Strollers went back into the garage, and Wonderboy had to settle for a ride in the wimpy umbrella stroller I keep in the minivan, the one with the blue plastic wheels. SuperStroller has giant black rubber wheels with inch-deep tread, wheels that could crush the mall stroller with one roll. The umbrella stroller was complaining about the stray bits of gravel on our paved street long before we reached the end of our development, where the dirt-and-stones nature trail begins.
So there we were bumping our way down the steep path through the trees, and Jane and I were looking for the trees we’d learned to identify on the Tree Walk last month. We can spot a hickory now, not just shagbark but all kinds of hickories, because of the diamond-like patterning of their bark. We hoped for a hornbeam—Jane was enchanted by the naturalist’s description of the hornbeam’s trunk as being “like muscles with no skin.” It’s true, hornbeams don’t have smooth, round trunks; they ripple in slender, wiry curves, like a sinewy arm.
“Mommy, look, a holly!” Jane cried. Beanie wanted to know where, and Rose was proud that she could identify it even though she hadn’t been with us on the Tree Walk.
“Poison ivy!” shouted Bean, not to be outdone at botanical identifications.
“There’s a beech,” Jane told her sisters. “You can tell by the light brown leaves still hanging to it. Beeches like to hold their leaves all winter.” She launched into a lengthy description of the woolly aphids that feed on the sap of a giant beech at the nature center. The Tree Walk guides had pointed out the tree, but it was still too early in the season, too cold, and there weren’t any aphids that day. Jane and I saw them last summer, though, during the butterfly walks which are the highlight of her year. The Tree Walk guides talked about how the aphids look like wisps of quivering cotton on the branches. They did not mention the harvester caterpillar which feeds on them, making it the only carnivorous species of caterpillar. Jane was more than happy to chime in with that information. Whenever we go on these guided hikes at the nature center, it’s like she is E.T. at the moment of reunion with his fellow extraterrestrials. These are her people, these marvelous woodsy folks who know all about caterpillars and salamanders and wood poppies and hornbeams.
Peattie’s introduction to Natural History of Trees goes on to say, “But a name is only a door open to knowledge; beyond lie the green ways of growing and, too, all that makes a tree most interesting and important to man. Almost every tree in our sylva has made history, or witnessed it, or entered into our folkways, or usefully become a part of our daily life.”
Right now Wonderboy is at an age when much of our conversation is about the names of things. He’s been in hearing aids for five months or so now, which means his “listening age” for comprehending spoken language is about the same as a five-month-old’s. We name everything for him, with speech and with sign language, and his world is expanding at a breathtaking rate. And for me, this walk through the woods was full of that same kind of magic connection. The names of these trees are, as Peattie so beautifully puts it, open doors inviting me to relationships, to stories, to a world roots and nests and secrets.
I was not made for this, griped Wonderboy’s stroller, as we rattled our way along the path.
I was born for this, said the look in Jane’s eyes.
Rose found some fortune cookies leftover from a dinner we ordered, gosh, three weeks ago. Ugh, if you ask me. But the girls were thrilled. They tore into them and then Beanie sent up a wail. Her cookie had no fortune. This was tragic.
Rose disappeared. Jane took the the biggest half of Beanie’s cookie and turned away so Bean couldn’t see her trying to stuff her own fortune in the hole. But there was no fooling Beanie. Indignantly she took the cookie away from Jane and disdainfully returned Jane’s fortune. Jane shrugged an “oh well, I tried” shrug.
About this time, Rose re-appeared, grinning like the Cheshire cat. When she is pleased with herself, she brings to life all the cliched descriptions of glittering, twinkling, sparkling eyes. She thrust a slip of paper at Beanie.
“Here’s your fortune!” she announced.
Beanie lit up. THIS, apparently, was no pity-fortune passed on secondhand. This was a real fortune created specifically for Bean.
Bean approved.
“Read it to me, mommy!” She handed me the slip of paper.
YOU LOVE WHAT YOU SEE, it said.
Beanie nodded. “Yup.” She wandered away, leaving the fortune in my hands. Rose was still standing there grinning. I asked her how she thought of writing that.
“Oh, it just sounded like a real fortune,” she said. “Plus it’s true.”
Jane laughed. “She’s right. Bean DOES love just about everything she sees.”
They all drifted off to play, and I sat there for a long time looking at that slip of paper, loving what I saw.
I’m on a quest, and I just know someone out there will know what I’m talking about.
In the summer of 1987, I was a counselor at a performing arts camp in Missoula, Montana. One of the campers brought with her a tape recording of her favorite storyteller. I don’t remember his name, but one of the stories has stuck with me all this time and in fact has worked its way into our family lexicon. The tale was about two children who found themselves in a strange land governed by the King of the Raisins. (“He was married to a wafer.”) The raisins are amiable enough despite their aversion to the strange wiggling things at the end of the children’s arms—
“What you got there, worms?”
“No, they’re fingers! See?”
(Sound of raisins screaming.) “Ahhhh! Horrible, horrible! But I like you anyway.”
I find myself quoting the horrified raisins now and then, usually while changing a particularly toxic diaper. I’ve told as much of the story as I can remember to my kids, but I long to hear the whole thing again and find out if it’s really as hilarious as I remember it.
Does it ring a bell for any of you? No? Oh, that’s horrible, horrible. But I like you anyway.
I usually keep a picture of the kids as the background image of our office computer, or else a breathtaking Scottish landscape to inspire me. (Darn sporting of Scott to put up with that, I must say.) On the upstairs computer I like to download a painting by an artist we are interested in.
Lately I’ve been a little calendar-obsessed, though, and I decided I wanted one on the computer desktop at all times. Found this nifty web page at Artchive. Nice little monthly calendar over a painting or detail of a painting. This month is a closeup of the hands in Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride.” While you’re at the site, you can vote on which painting will be next month’s wallpaper.
On the upstairs computer, I pleased the kids by downloading this image from the Beatrix Potter website. I’ve always been partial to Mrs. Tiggy-winkle….I think Jane would prefer something from Redwall, though.
The new issue of MacBeth Derham’s Wild Monthly is up! This month’s theme is crabs, a big favorite around here. Rose got a pair of hermit crabs for her birthday last summer. Scott and I had been planning the gift for months—she was pining for a pet. Imagine my horror, the day before her birthday, when I asked her what she’d like for her birthday dinner and she answered promptly: “Crab legs!”
The gruesome pet-and-platter combination didn’t seem to faze her a bit, however. At the birthday dinner, she happily wolfed down her crab legs while animatedly discussing names for her new, instantly beloved pets. (She finally settled on “Pagoo” and “Pagooess.”) She’s going to love exploring the links in this issue of Wild Monthly.
Here’s an excerpt:
Careful planning went into our honeymoon in Mexico. My husband and I wanted to spend time visiting Mayan ruins rather than partying in nightclubs in Cancun. We visited Coba, which boasts the tallest Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan, Nohoch Mul. We visited Tulum, the city by the sea, which boasts the “descending god” images that have delighted those interested in extraterrestrials and so-called “ancient astronauts.” We also visited a small area of ruins near Cancun called El Rey…
Read the rest!
