A Boy’s Life

I’m watching Robin eat squash soup, all by himself, with a spoon. I tried to get him just to drink it from a cup, but he wants to use the spoon. It’s crazy messy, but I know that it’s good practice for him, and that it’s toddler nature to want to do things the way his parents do. He’s no fool: he can see perfectly well that we eat our soup with spoons, and he’s made it his job to figure out how to do that too.

I actually love watching his care and concentration as he navigates the soup to his mouth. And more than that: there’s something deeply, intensely rewarding in watching my son slurp up his vitamin-packed, all-organic, all-local, cooked-from-scratch squash soup. It’s like with every bite he takes my hindbrain purrs, good mom, good mom. Partly because food = love in my brain, but even more particularly because it’s squash soup, and I associate squash with my mom, so it’s like: Yes! I’m doing it right!

Weird the kind of deep buttons food can push for us, huh? Well, at least the mess is pretty localized, so it’ll be easy enough to mop up later.

So, we didn’t end up taking Robin out trick-or-treating: he was having too good a time visiting with his Nonna, Pappy, and anti-Sara. And the doggies. And the trains. He looooved a train video his Pappy had, and now he wants to talk about “choo-choos” all the time. Unfortunately his vocabulary is still highly limited, so the conversation is pretty much restricted to Robin shouting “choo choo!” over and over. He really likes it when you ask him what sound a train makes, because he’s got the answer down pat.

Anyway, we don’t have Halloween pictures, but since we did get him a costume we’ll probably dress him up and snap some shots anyway. Maybe later tonight.

Meanwhile, in our veggie box we got several huge glorious bunches of fresh leafy greens: chard, kale, broccoli rabe, arugula, and a bunch of beets with the greens still attached. We also got cabbage, lettuce, six kiwis, four fuyu persimmons, and five mandarin oranges—Robin will probably gobble these up as soon as he realizes we have them. He’s not as big a fan of kiwis, but I can usually pawn them off on him, since neither Sam nor I like them (too slimy! too many seeds!).

Tonight I’m making the squash soup that I didn’t get around to fixing last week. Tomorrow, we’ll have a salad using the lettuce, the arugula, and the beets (roasted), along with the persimmon-apple pie that I also didn’t make last week. Friday night we can have pasta with broccoli rabe, Italian sausage, and beet greens; Saturday night, I’ll make polenta with chard (one of my favorite recipes). Sunday night we’ll have a Tuscan cabbage and white bean stew, even though every time I make a recipe that describes itself as “Tuscan” I think of this bit from The Onion. Monday night, Indian-spiced lentils with kale over brown rice, and Tuesday, leftovers. And that’s what’s for dinner!

So that housing deal is showing some abortive signs of possibly lurching back from the dead. The seller’s bank wants to work with us to get a 203k mortgage. They’re willing to extend escrow 90 days (it shouldn’t take that long, but with a 90 day extension we wouldn’t have to worry about running out of time like we did on the other deal) and they’ll lower the purchase price to accommodate the cost of repairs. So now we’re waiting to get all that in writing, and then we’ll do some more inspections to make sure that the roof repairs and the fumigation are all that the house needs. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it. The one good thing is that if the repair costs stay under 35K, we could get what’s called a “streamlined” 203k mortgage, which would presumably be much less of a bureaucratic nightmare.

Meanwhile in our veggie box this week we got: lettuce, broccoli, four beets, four leeks, two tomatoes, a bag of little sweet peppers, three persimmons, a pomegranate, a bunch of cilantro, a kabocha squash, and a thing I’d never seen before that turned out to be kohlrabi. Last night for dinner we had a big salad of lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, kohlrabi (it tasted exactly like broccoli-flavored jicama), bacon, and hard-boiled eggs, with home-made blue cheese dressing. Robin and I had the leftovers for lunch.

Tonight I’m using the leeks and beets in a buffalo borscht. I’ve gotten on a buffalo kick lately—I tried it in something, I forget what now, and thought it was delicious; plus it’s cheaper than grass-fed beef and has all the same health advantages (high in omega-3s, low in cholesterol and “bad” fats). Although I’m afraid my buffalo borscht might not turn out well since the friendly butcher warned me that buffalo meat is too lean to stand up to extended cooking. Well, we’ll see. If it comes out tough as shoe leather I guess we can just eat around the buffalo parts.

Tomorrow I’m going to try making cilantro pesto, which is again sort of a gamble, although there are plenty of recipes online. If it doesn’t come out well we can pick something up on the road, because tomorrow evening we’re packing up and heading to Carson City to celebrate Nonna’s birthday. Can’t wait to see everyone! It’ll be a short visit—we’re coming back on Sunday. Monday night I’ll finish up the vegetables by making Roasted Kabocha Squash Soup with Pancetta and Sage, and a persimmon-and-apple pie for dessert (I should post that pie recipe, it’s good).

Hopefully I’ll also have some cute Halloween pictures to post later in the week!

Back home to some bad news: there’s significant termite infestation in the house we were hoping to buy, and it needs a whole new roof. This will make it impossible to get an ordinary mortgage, and as you can probably imagine, we’re pretty reluctant to go down the 203K route again. We’re just kind of processing the news right now, but I feel pretty crushed. I was trying not to get my hopes up, but I guess somewhere along the way I did. I’m tired. I’m sick of this. I can’t stand looking at another house that will never be mine.

I think we’re going to have to take a break from house-hunting for a while.

Let’s talk about something nice, like dinner. This week in our vegetable box we got six gala apples, a bunch of arugula, some lettuce, some spinach, a bunch of radishes, a head of radicchio, a bag of bok choy, four fuyu persimmons, three eggplants (one big globe and two small skinny ones), and a sugar pie pumpkin.

Tonight we’re having baba ghanoush, homemade pita bread, and a salad of the radicchio and arugula with persimmons, pomegranate seeds, and blue cheese in a balsamic vinaigrette. The recipe is from the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market Cookbook. It’s very colorful—here’s a picture:

Tomorrow Robin and I will have the bok choy for lunch—I’ll braise it with garlic and stir in a pack of cooked ramen noodles. For dinner we’ll have penne with spinach, sausage, and sun-dried tomatoes.

Saturday is D&D and hence a good night for leftovers or delivery; Sunday we’ll have whatever meat is on sale at the butcher counter, and a green salad. I might make a pumpkin pie, if I feel inspired. Monday, beef stroganoff; Tuesday, leftovers. And we’ll eat the apples just as they are.

Oh, I meant to link to this recipe for squash and apple bake, which I made last week. It’s very sweet, but would make a nice side dish for Thanksgiving. I’ll probably make it again, next time we get acorn squash and apples in the same box, but I’ll tone down the sugar and the butter next time.

So we’re here in Baltimore visiting Nina and Bizzy and the utterly snorglable baby Silas, enjoying the (considerable!) charms of Charm City—we all went to the railroad museum yesterday, and today we’re planning to hit the aquarium. But I want to tell you about our adventure last night, after we’d kissed the baby’s toes for the last time and headed back to our plush hotel.

We knew we needed diapers, so we stopped by a grocery store to pick some up. However we got distracted in there (”We should pick up some bananas!” “How about some cheese?”) and ended up coming out with two full bags that did not include any diapers. We only realized our mistake back in the hotel room, two bananas later, when Robin started tugging at his pants and announcing “Poopy! Poopy!”

He sure was. He was very, very stinky: and we were out of diapers. It was close to midnight local time (we were still awake because it’s three hours earlier in San Francisco). We called down to the concierge and asked if there were any 24-hour groceries or drug stores nearby. He suggested a 7-11 a block away, so Sam set off on foot to buy some diapers, while I stayed back in the room to distract my poopy boy.

Unfortunately, the 7-11 didn’t have any diapers, so Sam was back ten minutes later and I was on the phone with the concierge again, getting directions to a grocery store a bit further afield. Meanwhile, Robin, perceiving that Sam was about to go out again, began expressing his desire to go along. It started with him tugging on Sam’s pant leg and then running to the door: “No,” said Sam, “you should stay here.”

“Maybe we should go with you,” I offered, “I can help you navigate and make sure you can read my directions.”

“No,” said Sam, “it’ll be easier if I just go. You’re in your pajamas.”

“It would only take me a minute to get dressed. The boy can stay in his PJs.”

Sam looked over at Robin. “Well, I guess since he’s already got his shoes on he might as well come.”

“Okay!” I said brightly, and started changing. Somewhere in the middle of that I actually registered what Sam had said. Indeed, Robin was standing by the door in his pajamas and sneakers. “Wait,” I said, “did YOU put his shoes on him?”

“No,” said Sam, “I assumed you did.”

“I sure didn’t. Has he got socks on?”

No, he didn’t have any socks on, and that clinched it: neither of us had put his shoes on him. Robin had put his shoes on all by himself. And yet that, while a notable “first” and an important achievement for a little boy, is only the third most amazing thing about this story!

The second most amazing thing, to me, is the multi-step chain of logic he must have used. “Daddy’s going outside,” he must have thought to himself. “I want to go with Daddy. In order to go outside I’ll need to have my shoes on. I’d better put on my shoes!” I didn’t quite realize he was capable of such logical and ordered thought at this stage.

But the most amazing thing of all is that it worked. Robin was absolutely correct in his thinking. It was because he already had his shoes on that Sam decided to bring him along. He was right!

There were bananas in our veggie box yesterday, which made me do a double take: bananas most certainly aren’t grown locally. I made a call to Capay Farms to see if we’d been switched over their their general-organics box, which I know includes some produce shipped in from out of state. They told me no, the bananas had only been included because we told them we don’t like melons (Sam’s allergic), and the other local boxes were getting honeydews. So all the other produce is still local, which is good: and we buy bananas anyway, so I don’t mind getting them in the box.

Besides the bananas we had lettuce, arugula, three beets, a bunch of leetle carrots, a bunch of radishes, a bag of bok choy, three sweet peppers, six oranges, four small tomatoes, and a sugar pie pumpkin. The oranges are incredibly juicy, and Robin loves them: he ate three last night and by the time he was done he was drenched in orange juice.

We have a special challenge this week, which is to eat all of the produce before we leave on Friday for Baltimore, on a long-awaited trip to see my BFF Nina, her lovely little woman, and their amazing new baby. We’ll be back on Tuesday: it’s a short visit, but with the house sale still in escrow I didn’t want to be out of state for too long. I’m terribly excited about seeing them.

The house deal seems to be proceeding normally, by the way: the bank will resolve the lien, and the inspections will be done on Monday. They were supposed to be done this week, but the power to the house got turned off and we had to wait for PG&E to turn it back on. I do feel for the people who are living there now, underwater on their mortgage and behind on the utilities, to the point that their power just got turned off. It really seems like this sale would be a good thing for everyone. I hope the inspections go well; if they do, we’ll close on November 6th. Send us your good thoughts, please: it’s been a long and tiring process.

Anyway, the easiest way to eat a lot of vegetables at once seems to be in a salad, so we had one last night with the lettuce, radishes, peppers, and carrots, and we’ll do another tonight with the arugula and beets. The bananas are already gone; if there are any oranges left on Friday we’ll bring them on the plane; and the pumpkin can sit around decoratively until it is, at some future date, made into a pie. Robin and I will have lentils with the tomatoes and beet greens for lunch. That leaves only the bok choy, which I guess I’ll braise with garlic, and we’ll eat it with the beet salad. It’s maybe not the most harmonious food pairing in the world, but it’ll do.

Robin has developed a bathtime ritual. He did it on his own; it took us a while to even notice. He got a set of dolphin-shaped bath toys for his birthday, and he likes to play with them in the tub. When it’s time to get out he’ll often grab a couple to take with him.

Then we noticed that out of a dozen or so plastic dolphins, it’s always the same two that he grabs: the orange and the light red (there’s also a dark red dolphin, but that one he never chooses). And he only holds on to them while we’re drying him off and putting him in his jammies. Once he’s set loose, the first thing he does is run back to the tub and drop the dolphins back in with the others. What purpose does this ritual serve? We have no idea.

He’s definitely gotten into the stage where he likes his routines. I think he mostly likes being able to make predictions about the world. He gets upset when, for instance, we start walking towards a destination he recognizes, like the park or the grocery store, but then veer off to go somewhere else. I think his understanding of the order of things is foggy enough that he really clings to the parts of it he can predict or control. Sometimes we call him the Iron Tyrant, on account of how harshly he protests when his expectations are violated.

At the same time, he is delighted by small acts of transgression. His very favorite reaction to provoke from us is one of surprise or mild disapproval: not anger, he doesn’t like that at all, but the recoil when (say) he runs up and licks us is hilarious to him. He craves our approval, of course, but it also seems that he craves our disapproval: he needs to know where the boundaries are, and he needs to push them just a little.

So that’s a toddler in a nutshell: he likes his routines, he wants a predictable environment, but at the same time he’s always testing and pushing the boundaries. Trying to bring more of the world under his control. Mwah ha hah, says the Iron Tyrant!

I have a very sad story to tell, and here it is: I had planned to make stir-fried okra and tomatoes with Indian spices tonight, served over brown rice, but when I got to the store there was no more okra. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard?

Well, maybe not. All it really means is that summer is truly over, and we’re well into autumn: the season of soups, stews, squashes, and slow-cooked everythings. It’s hard to feel sorry for myself when I put it that way. Still, I didn’t get anywhere near enough okra this year. Next year, with any luck, I’ll grow it myself in my own garden.

Oh, about that: we do have another offer in, and it’s progressing surprisingly well so far. I say “surprisingly” because the property strikes us as being in all ways too good to be true: a beautiful (oh so beautiful) historic bungalow on a nice street, in (apparently) good condition and in our budget. We’ve pretty much accepted that we can have old-fashioned detailing, a nice location, or a home in good condition, but not all three, at least not in our price range. This one is all three so we don’t really believe in it: we just felt that we had to go through the formalities, you know, just in case. It is such a sweet house. We had to try.

Well, we’ve gotten further than we thought we would. It’s a short sale, so we expected this offer would die the same way the last one did: with the bank refusing the sale. Much to our surprise the bank has accepted, and the seller accepted, so we’re now farther along in this process than we ever have been before. There’s two things left that could go wrong: the first is that the inspections could turn up something dreadful, even though the house looks to be in great shape. The second is that there’s another lien on the property (not another mortgage holder, something smaller like utilities or something) and we need the sellers to take care of this before the title can be transferred. Either of these conditions are potentially deal-killing, but we’re not even going to order the inspections until we get some assurance from the sellers that the lien will be dealt with. The lien is definitely the more serious issue. I guess there’s just some part of me that assumes, or hopes, that the sellers and listing agent wouldn’t have even bothered putting this house on the market if there was no way it could be sold anyway. I mean, why would they? That would be dumb and a big waste of everyone’s time and energy.

Anyway. We’re waiting around for our hopes to be dashed, which they almost certainly will be—but like I said, we had to try. This house is better than any other we’ve seen. While we’re waiting, this week in our veggie box we got: lettuce, arugula, chard, beets, radishes, a pint of figs, two grapefruits, two acorn squash, three sweet peppers, and eight slicer tomatoes.

I thought tonight I’d use most of the tomatoes in the okra stir-fry, but like I already told you, that didn’t work out so good. So instead we had a repeat of those “English Mutton Chops” from my Italian cookbooks. To which I can only say, YUM. I don’t know if it’s because the meat is locally raised and grass-fed, or if all mutton is that good, but let me tell you, a pair of lamb or mutton chops sprinkled with salt and pepper, brushed with butter, and broiled for five minutes on a side make for a fantastic dinner. As a side we had creamed chard from this recipe (also delicious).

Tomorrow night we’ll have baked squash with apples (the recipe was tucked in our veggie box, and I’ll post it if it turns out well) and a beet salad. I’ll also make fig bars.

Friday night, a roast chicken and a green salad with the rest of the veggies. I’m really liking the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for avocado ranch dressing: I’ll post that if anyone’s interested.

(As a side note, I always rewrite the recipes I post, so as to respect copyright law. I don’t know if everyone realizes, but recipes, like software algorithms, or all ideas ever, really can’t be copyrighted: they belong to humanity. What can be copyrighted is the specific language or creative expression used to encapsulate the ideas in question. So you can always share recipes as long as you don’t plagiarize the descriptions.)

Right, so. Saturday night, we’ll have pasta with tomato sauce. Sunday I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends, so we’ll have leftovers or sandwiches for dinner. Monday, something simple like pork chops; and Tuesday, baked potatoes with asparagus. So yeah! Despite myriad digressions, that’s the plan.

So that Hubbard squash turned out to make a fantastic soup. I started with the recipe given here, roasting the squash as they suggest with garlic cloves, a drizzle of honey, and sprigs of fresh thyme:

I scooped out the roasted squash flesh into a food processor, and processed it with a splash of cream until it made a nice even puree.

I didn’t have a ham hock, and I was dubious about the amounts of cream and milk called for in the original recipe (a quart? Really?), so I made some variations. I started by chopping up four pieces of thick-cut bacon into half-inch pieces, and frying them over in the bottom of a stockpot over medium-high heat. When the bacon had darkened in color and released its grease, I added the diced onion and two ribs of diced celery, and sauteed them in the bacon grease (I think I also put in a splash of olive oil, because there wasn’t that much fat in the pan, and I think about half a teaspoon of salt) until the vegetables were soft. Then I peeled the four garlic cloves that had roasted with the squash, mashed them up, and sauteed them with the vegetables and bacon for just a minute, until fragrant. Then I added the squash pulp, stirred everything up, sauteed it all for a few minutes more, and then added the five cups of chicken stock and another sprig of fresh thyme (I didn’t have the savory the recipe called for).

The recipe suggests letting everything simmer for 45 minutes, but I gave it like five because I was hungry, and it already tasted really good. Then I put in a cup of cream (hey, it’s better than a quart!), some more salt, a lot of fresh-ground pepper, and I put it into bowls and we ate it. It was easily the best squash soup I’ve ever had. Sam was enthusiastic about it too, although Robin wouldn’t even try it. He’s getting pickier, unfortunately. Maybe he didn’t like the color?

We had leftovers, but they disappeared quickly too.

I think Robin’s had a growth spurt recently. I’m constantly stunned by how much more mature his face looks. I feel like I can see what the seven- or eight-year-old Robin will look like now.

And the baby in his face has disappeared. I was afraid I would miss that tiny baby when he was gone, but now that I’m here, I really don’t. It seems like Robin is more himself with every month. He’s joining us more fully in the world. It doesn’t feel like a loss. My friend Madeline once said something like, “babies are nice, but I like little kids even better,” and I think I agree.

Of course I can say this because Robin is still small enough to climb in my lap and curl up under my chin, or fling his chubby arms around my neck and sack out on my shoulder. I’m pretty sure I’ll miss that when a monosyllabic teenager has taken his place.