March has begun. It is spring break at Lehigh; a little change of pace, a tiny break in our rhythm. It has been a long winter and today — for the first time in months — I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I took the photo above with my phone as I walked to my car in the parking lot of a coffee shop. I stopped for a minute just to feel that sun on my face.
The Lehigh students are away on spring break. They are in Cancun, and Miami, and some are at home with their families, and some are doing things that I can only dream of right now (one told me she was going to spend the week with some of her friends on her family’s boat in the British Virgin Islands; oh how I’d love to be spending a week that way right now!). I’m not jealous though; I’d never want to be twenty again. I’m happy for them all, and I worry about those for whom I know going home is hard. As for me, I’m truly glad this week to be in sunny Pennsylvania where today it was registering 53 degrees and it felt like the most beautiful day that there ever was.
I am External Member for a dissertation committee of an old student of mine from Lehigh. She graduated years ago and today she was defending her dissertation prospectus in criminal justice at Rutgers University. It was gratifying to hear her speak so eloquently about her work, with such sophistication. It is incredible now, more than a decade into teaching, to be able to look at these amazing people and say, “I knew them when.” I feel proud of, and grateful for, the work I’m doing. It is hard work, but it is good work.
At home too. It is so hard, but so good. The work I’m doing at home I am proud of, and grateful for. Meera’s homework today was another reminder that March is here.
The boys’ pants too are another reminder that March is here. In the laundry room tonight I sprayed these suckers with at least a quarter of a bottle of ‘Spray ‘N Wash’ and threw them in the washing machine and hoped for the best. This is what it is all about people— if your pants don’t look like this at the end of a beautiful early March day, then something is wrong! I hate laundry, and I’m happy to do this laundry tonight. Finally! Some muddied up pants to wash!
The start of March also means swimming lessons. The boys have no more levels to reach. They’ve swam their way right out of lessons. But Miss Meera is right back in the pool once a week this spring semester, and loving it. While Braydon took her to swimming lessons tonight, the boys and I wrapped up a 2-day-long game of Monopoly. Kids vs. Parents. These guys are so freaking competitive! How did this happen? Tonight I was able to be fully present and sit back and see them for who they are– all the crazy good and crazy bad– and I am proud and grateful for who they are and who they are becoming.
We are, as usual, going at full tilt. There is too much each day to blog about. I’m proud and grateful for that. Our life is like a lion roaring. It is too much to try to track it, almost too loud to take in. I can’t do it justice as I try to capture it. So, I’m just jotting down what I can in fits and starts these days. It’s the best I can do for right now. And I’m learning that sometimes, the best I can do, just has to be good enough.
There are no lambs around here right now. It is all lion. And it is all good. Even the bad is good enough.
Meera continues to be prolific in her production of artwork. Everyday she produces mass amounts of it. Most of them are drawings and paintings, but lately she’s been doing a lot of cutting and taping. Today, after school, she was at work, as usual, with her tape and scissors and markers. This was one of the (many) things she made. It was different than anything I’d seen her do before, so I asked her what the title of it was. She said, “University.” She explained that she cut out the paper in the “look of university buildings” (the top edge), and then drew the “campus” on it. The clock is “like a bell tower,” there is “a tree and flower and path,” and “a student on the path,” with some clouds in the sky. University. This is a little glimpse into a slice of her world.
I arrange my entire schedule around school-pick-up. I can’t pick up my bambinos every day (not even close), but the majority of days I do. It means an insane daily calendar, and it means dragging my kids with me to some late-afternoon-meetings-and-events, and it means overcompensating with some very late nights with me working into the wee hours, and it means a lot of juggling, but it is something I’m committed to, and something I feel is worth the craze it creates.
When I first started on the faculty at Lehigh I had a colleague whose wife was a psychologist. She knew a lot about child development, parenting, and family counseling. She also had raised three boys and done what seemed — at least from all outside appearances — to be a superb job of it. Years ago, before I even had kids of my own, I asked her once at a dinner party — “So, what is your biggest piece of parenting advice?” (This is one of my favorite questions to ask people.) She told me: “Be the one to pick up your kids from school.” She went on to explain that doing whatever it took to be the one to get them off the bus, or pick them up for the drive home, was her #1 parenting tip. “They’ll tell you more in the first twenty minutes after school than they’ll tell you in the next 20 hours. In that first twenty minutes you’ll consistently find out more about their day, about their thoughts, about their feelings, and about them, than you will at any other time. And once they’ve said it once, they won’t say it again. So, you only have that one twenty minute shot each day.” It really struck me. And stuck with me. And when my kids became school age, school-pick-up became the axis on which my entire calendar is arranged.
Crazy, I know.
But, in my experience, my colleague’s wife was crazy right! As it turns out, the bambinos’ school is a twenty-minute drive from home. They could take the bus, but we all choose for us to drive it instead. Braydon drives them to school each morning. And I covet and cherish those twenty minutes in the car with them each afternoon. There are days we can’t swing it, and days that Braydon and I have to switch, and days that the kids have to do extended care (After School Program), but most days, I get those twenty minutes in the car with them. And I feel like that’s a privileged sacred time I have with my three precious kids.
Whenever I can, I bring Dash with me for school pick-up. He loves it just as much as I do. He waits with me in the pick-up line, patiently sitting on top of the arm rest between the two front seats, eagerly peering out the front windshield awaiting a glimpse of one of his three favorite people on earth. With his eyes peeled he sits at full attention as kid after kid walks out of the school. And then he spots his three! And, just like me, his ears perk up, his heart starts racing (I can feel it pounding through his chest!), and he starts getting antsy to greet them. He’s all over them when they climb in the car— just like their mama is. He’s got a wildly wagging tail, and I’ve got a million questions about their day, and we’ve got twenty minutes to bring them home and soak them in.
It is (sadly) rare these days for me to do a Food Friday — which should just go to show how extraordinary these meatballs are! These are so good, and so easy, that it would be sacrilege for me to not share this recipe.
I know I’m not saying anything you don’t already know, but finding dinner ideas — specifically, ideas for dinners that can be put together quickly, easily, and relatively mindlessly at the end of a looooong day of work-and-school-and-meetings-and-homework-and-emails-and-sports-and-events-and-everything-else — is challenging… to say the least. And to gather up the energy to get out of our food ruts in the deep dark delirium of a looooong winter is even more challenging. But this Spaghetti & Meatball dinner is so good and so easy that it’s solidified its own position in our family’s regular dinner rotation this winter. Which, my friends, is really saying a lot.
These meatballs are so good! Before these meatballs, in the prior ten years of his existence on this planet, Kyle wouldn’t touch any sort of ground meat. And before these meatballs, even though the rest of us aren’t quite as adverse to all-things-ground-meat, we’d eat meatballs if we had to, but it would never be a choice. Now, post-these-meatballs? Everything has changed. The world is a different place. We are a Spaghetti & Meatball loving family!
This recipe is the result of my own cutting-and-pasting-and-blending-together of a bunch of different recipes I’ve found over the years from a variety of sources. Mainly, this is the result of me trying to master the art of Spaghetti & Meatballs this winter… but (and this is a big ‘but’)… distilling that art down to an essence that is achievable by the Home Cook With A Non-Food-World Career. Fellow Mommy-Professors (and everyone else out there who doesn’t have time to grind their own meat and/or chop fresh herbs and/or make their own sauce, etc., etc., etc.) — if you are looking for a good, down-home, easy weeknight Spaghetti & Meatball recipe: this one’s for you!
Ingredients
- 1 onion, finely diced
- 3-4 tablespoons olive oil
- salt & pepper
- 4-6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
- 3 pounds “meatloaf & meatball mix” (ground veal, beef, pork)
- 4 eggs
- 2 cups Italian style seasoned breadcrumbs
- 2 cups shredded parmesan cheese
- 1 cup water
- your favorite off-the-shelf tomato sauce (our favorite is Classico Tomato & Basil)
- your favorite spaghetti (our favorite is Barilla Plus multigrain)
Directions
- Drizzle about 1 tablespoon of olive oil into a large saute pan, add onions, and season generously with salt and pepper. Place pan over medium-high heat. Cook about 5 minutes, stirring only a couple times (for the most part, let the onions sit), until onions are soft and translucent. Add garlic, and cook 2 minutes more.
- Put the following into a large bowl: the cooked onion mixture, meat, eggs, breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, and water. Mix this gently with your hands. Don’t over-work this, or “mush” it too much. You want it to be airy, barely holding together, and just barely all mixed together. Keeping it loose and light (not dense) is key!
- Form into meatballs — about the size of a golf ball — by gently shaping with hands. Don’t roll these in palms, or even try to make them too round. Just barely form them loosely into balls. Again, keeping these loose and light (not dense; barely holding together!) is key!
- TIP FROM MY KITCHEN TO YOURS: At this point, I separate out about 1/2 or 2/3 the meatballs to freeze. Wrap about a dozen meatballs in non-stick foil, put in freezer bags, and place in freezer. This will give us 1 or 2 other Spaghetti & Meatball dinners down the road… on nights even crazier than the one in which I’m making this batch of balls! I promise, you’ll thank me later for this one.
- Meanwhile… TO PREPARE THE DINNER: Get water boiling for the pasta. While that’s heating up, in the same pan in which you sautéed the onions (don’t even wash it), drizzle 2-3 tablespoons olive oil (enough to coat the pan). Heat the pan on medium-high heat, and add meatballs to pan. Let sit until they start to brown, then turn them 4-6 times to brown the meatballs on all sides. Important note: (Owen would say this is the most important point) the meatballs should be browned on their sides, but not cooked through (for Owen, the key is that they are not dried out at all; they should be very moist and soft and still a tiny bit pink in the center).
- PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER: Add pasta to boiling water. The pasta should boil for about 10 minutes (or however long the box says; I’ve learned to set the timer consistently and stick to right to the minimum amount of time it says on the box, in order to have perfectly cooked pasta every time). Right after you add the pasta to the water, cover the meatballs with sauce. It should take about 10 minutes for the sauce to heat through, the meatballs to just barely cook through the center, and the pasta to be ready to strain. As soon as the sauce is heated through, and the meatballs are cooked through, remove from heat and/or keep on the lowest setting of the stove.
- TO SERVE: Serve meatballs on top of spaghetti, with parmesan cheese. Or, serve the meatballs in sub rolls for meatball subs! Watch out!— if your family becomes converts to this meal like mine has, you’ll have to act fast to keep the meatballs from disappearing from the pan on the stove. The most recent time I made these for dinner (last week), half the meatballs had been stolen from the kitchen before we even sat down to eat. That’s how much Kyle and Owen love these!
- Enjoy!
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Kyle’s been taking drumming lessons this academic year. Owen’s taking piano (he’s been on again and off again with piano… he’s currently on again). They do their music practicing/homework in the lounge of our building, which is just down the hall from our apartment. They also play in that lounge a lot. And, of course, we live with about 150 college students who — in many ways, just like Kyle and Owen — structure their entire lives around their practicing/homework and “play”time. They live by the “work hard, play hard” motto. A tiny detailed slice of how this all comes together in a crazy way is the Sayre B Lounge. The Sayre B Lounge is quite the multi-purpose room. It is a music room / play room by day (basically, 8am-8pm), and a study hall by night (basically, 8pm-8am). At any given hour, of any given day, you may find any number of things going on in there. It is quite the mixed-use space!
Meera is really — really — deeply interested in female superhero comic book volumes. These are not the sorts of things you’d typically find a 6-year-old reading (let alone their parents reading these to them) — they tend to be pretty graphic, and sometimes violent, and often involve subject matter that is way over the head of a young kid. But Meera is truly engaged in these, and really understands the storylines, and is more wrapped up in these than any other books she’s ever been exposed to.
Braydon reads these to Meera — it is something that the two of them share, and do together. They’ve read through the entire series of Spider-Girl and Super-Girl. And now they wait together, chomping at the bit in anticipation and excitement, for the next volume in each series to be released. Meera will often sit for long stretches of time pouring over volumes that they’ve already read, looking over the pages again and again, and following the storylines over and over.
Kyle and Owen (and me!) have no interest in these. This is Meera’s thing. And luckily, Braydon enjoys these books enough that he is happy to read them to her. But for most people who know Meera, they’d be shocked to find this out about her. She comes off as the stereotypical ‘Girly Girl,’ lover-of-all-things-frilly-and-pink, and enthralled with princesses and fairies and Barbies. The girl-power theme of these comics isn’t exactly what most people would imagine Meera being so into. But she is. And this is something that we love — and that we celebrate — about our girl. Deep down, she’s a complex little being with more to her than you’d imagine at first glance. She loves Fancy Nancy, and Ladybug Girl, and Berenstein Bears, but she’ll choose Super-Girl over any of those any day of the week. That’s an awesome aspect of Meera that not many people get to see.
Recently, I had a bunch of my graduate students over to our house. One of them happened to notice Meera’s collection of girl-power-comics on a shelf, and asked me about them. “Who reads those?,” he asked. When I told them that Meera does, he was immediately smitten. For someone who loves these sorts of comics, to discover a six-year-old kindred spirit is kind of a big deal. Yesterday, he brought me a new comic to give to Meera — Ms. Marvel. He had bought it, and read it over to make sure it was ok in his opinion, and then asked me to give it to her. I was so moved by this gesture, and happy to be the go-between in this brewing friendship between twenty-something-male sociology grad student and six-year-old-female first grader.
Ms. Marvel was not something on the radar of Braydon and me, but fortunately for Meera, she’s now got a hardcore comic reader who’s looking out for her. Ms. Marvel was in Meera’s hands as soon as she got home from school yesterday. She even brought Ms. Marvel to Kyle and Owen’s basketball game last night, and was pouring over it in the stands (photo below). And today, as soon as she got home from school, she was deep into it again (photo at top of this post). Braydon is reading it to her right now, as I write this post.
I don’t know where this whole girl-power-comic-volume thing is going, but it seems to be sticking… It has been well over a year of a constant and deep interest on the part of Meera. It has been a really intriguing part of Meera’s journey so far, and it has been so interesting for Braydon and I to watch this developing in her.
Still 10 weeks to go until the end of the semester (and those last few are always a killer), but we are going strong with the Living-On-Campus gig. The “new” apartment (the expansion that happened this summer… I know, I know, I know! I still need to blog all about that) has made our space so much easier to entertain in. And we’re really packing in the events this year. As of today, we’ve hosted 23 official events in our apartment since the start of the school year. Most of these have been for students. And all of these include food food food. Thank the goodness gracious for LU Catering (who, lucky for me, takes care of the food for most of our events)! And thank goodness gracious for Dash– who continues in his role as our beloved Resident (unofficial) Pet Therapy Dog. Students often arrive stressed and frazzled, but after some time with the miracle-worker-pup, their anxiety has come down a couple notches. I snapped the two photos here as “before” and “after” shots during an event we hosted today for my Eckardt Scholars (the Honors Program I direct).
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