We spent the weekend hosting a little mini-reunion with my two best friends from grad school. Although technically our heyday was our years in Boston as twenty-somethings bonding over the oftentimes torturous process of getting a PhD and all that’s involved with really growing up— we have managed to hold tight to each other for the past fifteen (or so) years. And although we’re also professionally connected via academic sociology, we have managed to also continue to be true friends that go way above and beyond any occupational realm. And although it is, at the core, our female friendship ties that bind, our significant others are fully in the fold too. We are good old friends. And so it lasts and it transcends time and change and living in different states and a bunch of kids now running around and everything else. And now it has been a bunch more years since our heyday than the number of years of our heyday. And, it reminds me, as we’ve been talking about a lot with Kyle and Owen over the past few days: “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.” There is nothing like a good old friend (or two). It was a really good weekend.
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1. Gwyneth. Regular readers now surely know how much I love Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook (I’ve mentioned it on this blog more than once, the first time being here: click), so I won’t go on and on and on about my adoration. But really, it is really good! Sometime mid-summer I made Gwyneth’s “Best Stir-Fried Chicken” and it was a huger-than-huge hit with my entire little family— everyone cleaned their plates (and Owen actually, literally, licked his). I’ve been making it regularly ever since.
2. Rice Steamer. What even the most regular-of-readers don’t know (because I haven’t posted about it yet) is that for Mother’s Day this year I asked for, and got, my currently-most-prized-possession in the kitchen: a really good rice steamer. I had been wanting a rice steamer for a long while, so when the time came (I can always count on Mother’s Day to get a really great new kitchen gadget! ha!), I made sure I did my research to find a good one. A friend whose advice in these arenas I trust suggested this one, and I have not been disappointed: the Oyama CFS-B18U All Stainless Rice Cooker! A rice steaming dream come true!
3. Makoto. Another thing I’ve never posted about is my love of Makoto Ginger Dressing. This salad dressing is really good for a store-bought dressing (in my grocery store I find it refrigerated in the produce section). I love the Makota Ginger Dressing so much that when I haven’t had it in a few weeks I start craving it. No kidding!
THE DINNER. Pull these three things together and BAM! A super easy, super tasty dinner! (This dinner has quickly become a regular in our rotation – not an easy feat to accomplish! Quick enough to make on a weeknight!)
- Chicken: see recipe below
- Rice: we J-Ms prefer plain steamed brown rice, but go for white if you prefer (or get fancy, like Gwyneth; she suggests her cookbook’s fried rice with kale recipe to go with the chicken), and if you don’t have a rice steamer no problem— just cook up some rice however you like to cook it
- Salad: I like to toss some greens and some fresh Mung bean sprouts with the Makoto dressing as an incredibly fast/easy combo… but really anything tossed with the Makoto dressing is awesome (if you can’t find Makoto then make some ginger dressing of your own, or find some other good brand of Asian dressing)
- Veggie: not necessary to have an extra veggie when we’ve got the salad already, but we can never seem to get enough veggies around here and Meera is particularly fond of sugar snap peas these days… I just quickly steam them (or we eat them raw)
Ta Da! Try this, and then tell me how much you and yours love it!
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Best Stir-Fried Chicken, recipe directly from Gwyneth’s cookbook
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts, cut into small cubes
2 tbsp cornstarch
Coarse salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1/4 cup peeled and minced garlic
1/4 cup peeled and minced ginger
1/2 cup minced green scallions (white & green parts)
Pinch red chili flakes (optional)
1/2 cup rice wine vinegar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
Toss the chicken with cornstarch, a large pinch of salt and quite a bit of pepper. Heat oil in large, non-stick wok over medium-high heat. Add the garlic, ginger, scallions and chile flakes (if using) and cook, stirring, for one minute. Add the chicken and cook, stirring occasionally, for five minutes. Add the vinegar, sugar, and five or six grinds of black pepper. Boil on high for three minutes, or until the sugar has caramelized and the whole mixture is dark brown and sticky and lovely. Add the soy sauce, and cook for another 30 seconds. Serve immediately, sprinkled with cilantro.
Yesterday was Braydon and I’s 10th wedding anniversary. We’ve got something on the calendar for next month for the two of us to celebrate that in a big way. In the meantime, to mark the occasion yesterday, we had a Party of 5 for breakfast at Friendly’s before school. The bambinos thought this was the greatest most special thing ever: to go out for breakfast (at Friendly’s!) on a school day! I have to admit: it was pretty darn fun!
Meera had her very first ballet class on Saturday morning. She loved it! She’s going to be going each week, and the best part is she’s doing ballet with her two best friends. Watching the three of them on Saturday had to be one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen!
MorMor and MorFar surprised us by spontaneously coming to visit for the weekend! Given that it takes a full day to drive here, this was a rare and special treat (they drove all day Friday and Sunday in order to spend Saturday with us). I had been talking on the phone with my mom last week, telling her how much I missed her, and telling her how much the kids missed her and my dad, and she spur-of-the-moment suggested that she and my Dad might come for the weekend. I almost cried I was so happy.
They arrived Friday afternoon. Meera was ecstatic when she found them in the house after waking up from her nap. And then Kyle and Owen were beside themselves with surprise upon seeing MorMor and MorFar at pick-up Friday after school!
We had such a good weekend. Saturday we got to bring MorMor and MorFar to our first football game of the season. Lehigh played University of New Hampshire (it was a big deal to K & O that MorMor and MorFar rooted for Lehigh despite the fact that UNH is their state’s school)! We had so much fun tailgating, watching the marching band, and hanging out at the game. Among other things, I was just so happy that my parents could finally see the MINDBLOWING CRAZINESS that is my boys’ interactions with the Lehigh co-eds at football games (flirting with the sorority sisters; tossing footballs and tackling with the frat boys; it is a real question as to which is more entertaining—watching the football game or watching my boys’ skills in the Charm Arena)!
We were sad to see them go on Sunday morning. But so grateful for the gift of their visit.
Well, we got through the first week. What a crazy time of year. I kind of wish that we were in the category of families who take these sorts of things more lightly (we have some friends who make a huge deal of it, and some friends who purposefully don’t). I actually think in some ways it makes more sense to not make a huge thing of it (take some pressure off the situation!). But suffice it to say that we J-Ms don’t. We take it the-opposite-of-lightly (as K & O would say). It is all a big huge deal. For better or for worse.
As the result of lots (and lots!) of effort, and probably even more luck, we sailed through the first week with relative ease. The boys love their first grade, adore their school, and are ridiculously excited because they’ll be playing soccer for their school team this year. Papi and I, on the other hand, while excited for our two uber-athletes, are feeling quite ambivalent… and I’ll admit: anxious… about the extremely rigorous soccer schedule; we are now full-speed-ahead into the world of organized sports—a world we held off from entering for as long as humanly possible, but a world in which we are now suddenly fully immersed. Meera, in an unexpected twist, is not so thrilled with her “new school.” For a bunch of complicated reasons, we moved her into a new daycare starting this fall (she took the summer off and began last week at a new place that we thought would be better). She’s struggling with the adjustment and we’re not 100% confident she’s going to be alright there. The next few days will be important ones in figuring out her situation.
In the meantime… we’re back to the grind with the school year routine. Summer seems like a distant memory as I valiantly attempt to enthuse myself for another year school lunch making. Yes, I know, I could throw a ‘lunchables’ in there and call it a night, but I cannot bring myself to do it. I don’t judge others for doing it (in fact, in many respects, I have great admiration for other parents who can do these things with much less vigor), but I seem to be hard-wired to make the bambinos’ lunches with 100% effort each and every time. I can’t explain it; I am just compelled to do it. Meera’s loving the boys’ old Laptop Lunch systems (K & O outgrew these long ago when their appetites way surpassed the maximum volume capacity of these bento boxes). The boys now beg for “thermos lunch” (translation: a hot and heavy lunch). They want tortellini, ravioli, mac-n-cheese, soups, leftovers of any kind… and the more thermoses on any given day, the better (i.e., ideal lunch = mac-n-cheese AND tomato soup… in other words, TWO THERMOSES EACH). They come home with empty lunchboxes each and every day. I swear, I know I sound like a broken record, but really: they are going to eat me out of house and home before they are even 12.
Back To School Week = Week Of Comfort Food here.
Day 1 was our Back-To-School Dinner
Day 2 was homemade mac-n-cheese, salad with French dressing (update to the linked-to post: we now affectionately call the salad dressing “Haitian Dressing” because it turns out that this is a very popular salad dressing in Haiti!)
Day 3 was teriyaki marinated steak, mashed potatoes, broccoli (I have an old teriyaki marinade recipe that is a new favorite of all three bambinos!)
Day 4 was take out pizza (Mommy teaches a grad seminar on Thursday nights!)
Day 5 was “Sunny Chick Pasta” & a mozzarella-tomato-basil salad (nothing says “September” to me more than the awesome farm stand tomatoes that are in abundance right now!)
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A little story about the first week that I don’t want to forget:
Before school started the boys received letters from their teacher. Among other things, the letter said that they were going to be learning a lot of “ology’s” in school this year– “geology, astronomy, meteorology…” etc. At the very top of the list was “sociology.” Well, Kyle could have just burst with excitement at this. “We’re going to do sociology Mom!!!!!! Sociology!!!!!!!!!!!” Before school even began he was making plans to ask his teacher if I could come in to be a Guest Speaker, strategizing for a field trip to my office, and deciding which of my books he was going to bring in to class for show-and-tell. Anyone who knows me can just imagine how insanely uncomfortable the prospects of this made me. (In a nutshell: am modest to a fault and self-promotion – or even the possible perception of it on the part of others – makes me extremely edgy.) I kept trying to blow it off (and have Kyle blow it off), re-direct his energies, and generally not encourage his grand plans. But by mid-way through his first week of school there was no holding him back any longer. He was determined to bring some of my books to class (as in, books of which I’m an author). He carefully selected three (the three which have covers most prominently displaying my name), and put them in his backpack (see photo at the top of this post) and off he went. I could have just died. After school that day I asked Kyle how it went with my books. He said, “GREAT!” and that was all he was willing to offer. At the end of the week the boys’ teacher approached me to thank me for letting Kyle bring in the books. I tried to explain how persistent he had been and that it was not my idea. She then told me the whole story of what went down in class. My anxiety quickly dispersed as I was just about rolling on the floor laughing at her re-telling of the story! Apparently Kyle was enthusiastically passing the books around and the kids (as in the whole class) insisted that they wanted to read my books. Their teacher eventually sat them down and read aloud one paragraph, which she then attempted to translate into 1st Grade Language. The kids, who had started out excited, were quickly lost in translation and completely overcome with confusion. Then one kid finally asked, “So, what is income?” And they then wound up in a deep conversation about income, wealth, and the difference between the two. I can just imagine the whole scene and I am practically laughing out loud (as I also cringe) even now as I type this out!
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And that’s a wrap! One week down, too many to count left!
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This summer we read the entire “Julian” series of books by Ann Cameron. This is the first series of books that Kyle and Owen have really latched onto and loved. We tried Harry Potter, and the Narnia series, but they didn’t stick. K & O just don’t seem to be fantasy-literature types (much to their Papi’s chagrin). What we’ve discovered, however, (much to their Mama’s thrill), is that they are big into contemporary reality-based fiction. The “Julian” books are just perfect for our boys. We highly recommend them for kids who aren’t the Harry Potter/Narnia types… particularly black kids who want to see characters who look like them represented in their reading (K & O are both definitely in this category). Here’s the amazon link: (CLICK).
This summer we also did “summer workbooks” for the first time. I initially bought the review-of-kindergarten summer workbooks, thinking the boys might benefit from keeping at the top of their academic game over the summer. We all quickly discovered that K & O loved working on these workbooks; they zipped right through the kindergarten ones and finished them before the summer was even halfway over. So, I bought the 1st grade ones, which were slightly more challenging, but oftentimes just as fun for the boys. They spent a lot of time this summer with their “workbooks”—it became a favorite pastime for them, and we often found them working on them at the kitchen table in the early morning or mid-afternoon. Some of my best memories of this summer are of sitting with K & O during Meera’s naps, working with them on their workbooks.
In mid-August we made our annual summer pilgrimage to New Hampshire. But this time we added a new twist— an overnight at my sister Stina’s house. Auntie Stina, Cousin Sadie, Uncle Mark, and Charlie (the dog) are much beloved by the J-Ms. They come up just about daily in conversation at our house— so while they are far, far away up in Maine, they are close, close to our hearts here in Pennsylvania. We were so excited to be invited to their house, and it turned out to be a major highlight of our summer.
While we were there we enjoyed lots of things. The scenery alone is breathtaking. We also had a great al fresco dinner. And the bambinos were enamored with the chickens, the chicken coop, and the eggs (the morning we woke up there Owen waited and waited for an egg to be laid, and his patience paid off with a fresh new egg laid right before his eyes… which Mark and Stina promptly fried up for him to eat for breakfast with his bagel). But the highlight of all highlights was an open-air ride better than any rollercoaster imaginable… a ride in the back of Mark’s truck around their fields. At first it was just the cousins. Then I jumped in too. And then Stina too. And then Braydon. Before long, we were all in the truck— for many spins around the field. It was a great, great time and one that will live in our memories for a long, long time.
As summer ends and fall begins we find ourselves reminiscing about our summer. “Mark’s Truck” and our visit to “Auntie Stina and Sadie’s House” is a big highlight.
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