While we're on the topic of having time and being inspired, I've been meaning to post this website on the blog for quite some time. I found it, quite randomly, through the RSS feed of the gmail account at my last job (spooky, right?). Heidi Swanson is a vegetarian chef who lives in San Francisco and shops at a lot of the same places we do! She's just published a new cookbook, Super Natural Every Day, but I just enjoy her website. The recipe archives are well-organized and easy to search. My only complaint is that some of the recipes lack zing: in other words, where she recommends a ... [READ MORE]
Cooking “Well”
July 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment
It has been woefully long since my last post. I left full-time employment on June 30 and you'd think that would leave me with much leisure time for things like blogging, but we went on vacation for ten days and since then I have been in turbo-nesting mode. My husband oscillates between amusement at my third-trimester behavior and mild panic that all this frenzied laundering of baby clothes and re-organizing of closets means our second child is making its debut any minute. Cliches aside, I am quite enjoying having two days a week to putter at will before the baby is born, and I am dipping ... [READ MORE]
Life Can Be So Sweet…
June 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment
It hasn't been the easiest of stretches, these past six months. Factors both inside and outside of my control have conspired to put me in one of those forests-versus-trees mindsets: you know the kind, where the daily details can start to overwhelm, and you lose perspective. When difficulty finding a parking space drives you to tears, something is out of whack. (Or maybe you're pregnant. Or a little of both.) Call it mental spring (summer?) cleaning, but I am resolved to turn this trend around and, as luck would have it, a few changes are afoot which are helping me along. 1) I am going ... [READ MORE]
Diggin’ on Dumpin’
June 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment
When I was a little girl, maybe three/three-and-a-half years old, my parents started training me to make my own breakfast. I would wake in the morning and head to the kitchen, where they would have left a bowl of dry cereal and a tiny pitcher of milk on a low shelf in the fridge. While they got ready for the day, I would pour the milk myself and settle at the table for breakfast. To this day, I eat cereal every single morning. Babyman and my husband eat breakfast together, side-by-side at the dining room table, hair askew, while I pack lunches in the kitchen. We have a window from the ... [READ MORE]
Gun-Shy
June 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment
My mother's group message board has been lighting up lately with requests for baby food inspiration. It's been a reminder that I'm in kind of a rut. I'm not going to be too hard on myself -- what I call "a rut" is really "the total lack of downtime afforded to two working parents whose child has abandoned his nap" -- but the long and the short of it is this: I am sick of the sight/taste/prospect of my own cooking. I make the same damn things every week and it's boooor-ing. My CSA box is the only thing keeping our kitchen remotely interesting these days. (Along with the odd pregnancy ... [READ MORE]
Toddler Food: the Fantasy & the Reality
June 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment
I was browsing through the New York Times' Motherlode blog this morning and this post jumped out at me. Yes. Exactly. Enjoy! ... [READ MORE]
Memorial Day 2011: The Menu
June 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment
We spent Memorial Day with my husband's best childhood buddies and their (lucky for me!) amazing wives. We have been taking variations of this same trip -- to one friend's house near South Lake Tahoe -- for over a decade, but the dynamics have shifted considerably as we have gotten older, gotten hitched, gotten pregnant. What was once a party house full of dudes and the occasional girlfriend is now a (mostly) civilized portrait of four couples, a dog, an infant, and a Cars-obsessed toddler (that would be mine). Where we once trucked down to the lake at 2am, Coors Lights in hand, for "polar ... [READ MORE]
