MamaPie

Impromptu

Scuba Diver costume:

Branching Out

Oh, chocolate chip cookies, how I love you.

My love affair with the chocolate studded disks started with Van deKamps, which were a staple in our house growing up.

For special treats, my mom would make the Toll House versions. I ate those late into the night, and then as the sun was rising, with my high school boyfriend the night before I left for college. My mom had baked them for the occasion (the occasion of my leaving for college, not the occasion of me and MP staying up all night together in her house. Of that occasion, she was completely unaware).

Living in Boston, after graduating from college, I grew to love the hard, huge and crumbly ccc's from the now-defunct Panini, which they also sold the the now-defunct Someday Cafe (there I would eat them while drinking a nice big soy chai, "Oregon Chai", actually).

Here in Portland I like the ccc's from Pearl Bakery and Crema. The New Season's ones are okay in a pinch.

I bake ccc's quite frequently, too. Andrew, who is perhaps an even bigger fan of the ccc than I am, loves it when he sees me pulling out the mixer and a bag of chocolate chips. My cookies are different from my mother's: I use organic chocolate chips (as well as organic eggs and sugar) and use either the recipe from How to Cook Everything or this one.

Ezra is my baking partner. We have been baking together since he was quite young. I love that ingredients and recipes are a natural part of his world. He likes to hear made-up stories that include detailed recipes and cooking instructions. We bake pancakes, waffles, pizzas, muffins and, of course, chocolate chip cookies. Always chocolate chip cookies.

I have stacks of torn-out magazine pages featuring mouth-watering photos of all kinds of exotic cookies. Cookies containing things like apricot jam, oatmeal, almonds, peanut butter and cream cheese. None of these ingredients go into chocolate chip cookies.

Whenever I tear out a delicious sounding cookie recipe I wonder if I'll ever actually make it, seeing as how ccc's are the default cookie around here.

Well, last night, I decided that things were going to change in the cookie department. There was, if you will, a new cookie sheriff in town. We had friends coming over today and I wanted to bake cookies and I didn't want them to be chocolate chip! So I asked Ezra if he wanted to bake cookies (a rhetorical question if there ever was one) and announced that we were going to bake lemon glazed ginger cookies. I had torn the recipe out of an old Martha Stewart Living just a few days ago and Ezra and I had talked about the recipe. I had said that maybe one day we'd make them and, by gosh, that day had arrived.

So, we baked them. And they're delicious. And I decided that we're going to work our way through those stacks of cookie recipes, one at a time: each week, a new kind of cookie. And so begins the C is for Cookie Project, as taken on by Mama and Ezra, with Reuben on the sidelines as he awaits his turn at the cookie sheet.

Now, without further ado, I present: Lemon-Glazed Ginger Cookies.

We Like to Write

The Dog who got Hurt Then was Happy
by
Ezra Lev W. C.

There was a dog named Annie. She had long ears that could reach to the ceiling and a long tail.

She hit her head on a rock when she was walking in the forest. She also hit her paw on some glass that went in her foot. And she got stung by a bumble bee.

She screamed.

Annie's papa used a pin to get the glass out. He pulled the bee away and pulled the rock out of her head.

Afterwards she wanted some mint cereal to eat.

THE END

Homemade Ice Cream Sandwiches

Eggy Goodness

Yesterday afternoon I made pasta from scratch. I found it was one of those things that sounds more intimidating than in actually is. It was pretty easy, pretty fun and tasted better than pretty good. I cut the pasta by hand, as it was my only choice. But, if I find that homemade pasta is making it into my regular cooking repertoire, I will probably invest in a hand-crank pasta maker.

 
 

I wanted to serve it with fresh mozarella and farmer's market tomatoes, but the farmer's market didn't have any tomatoes yesterday! So, we had it with butter, mozarella and coarse salt.

My other kitchen adventure yesterday didn't turn out as well. I tried making blueberry fruit leather in the dehydrator. I forgot the part about drying it for only 3 hours and instead left it on for...12 hours. Ezra thought the "fruit leather" tasted like, "that green crunchy stuff Papa likes." That would be nori. Not quite the flavor I was going for. We'll try again today.

You can run, but you can't hide

Ezra has always been very observant. When he was a baby, we would have to pull what we called "The Hat Trick" in order to get him to go to sleep. No matter how exhausted he was, if he was in the car or ergo or stroller - places where there were interesting things to look at, he would not close his eyes. One day Andrew discovered that if he pulled Ezra's hat down over his eyes, he would be asleep within seconds. The hat trick was born - and became an important part of our sleep trick repertoire.

His interest in the world has been present since infancy. He would watch waiters and busboys in restaurants so intensely when he was a baby that we would joke that he was their supervisor. Then there was the day where I was showing him what a hinge was on a gate and later that day as I was doing downward facing dog, he studied the shape my body was making and said, "Mama, hinge". And now, at 3.5, he is an uber-questioner, using his questions to more deeply understand the world around him: how various machines work, what would happen if...(last night's version was,"What would happen if we put Ruby in the fridge?") and, of course, the "whys". He watches and notices and takes note of small details.

Andrew and I are serious ice-cream lovers (we even had "I promise to eat ice cream with you" as part of our wedding vows) and many nights, after the boys are in bed, we indulge in hot-fudge sundaes. Last night was one of those nights - I heated up hot fudge and whipped up fresh cream. This morning, Ezra asked, "What did you make with the mixer?" BUSTED. I told him I'd made whipped cream and asked how he knew.  Gesturing towards the counter, he replied "I saw that the mixer arm was up.". I've got to get better at covering my tracks, remembering that there is a very keen pair of eyes in this house.

East Coast Extravaganza 2008: By the Numbers

Time we woke up to catch our flight to New York: 4:30am PST
Time we got to Andrew's parents house in the Hamptons: 7:30pm EST
Average # of hours of sleep I got each night on our trip: 5
Number of people staying in Andrew's parents house over the weekend we were there: 14
Number of poopy diapers I changed on the airplane rides: 5
Number of times in the Hamptons Ezra would let me or Andrew leave his side without getting hysterical: 0
Average number of times Reuben woke up each night in the Hamptons: 5
Average wake up time of Ezra and Reuben throughout the trip: 5am
How delicious Christina's ice cream still is on a scale of 1-10: 10
How great it was to see old friends in Boston on a scale of 1-10: 10+!
Number of diaper bags left in the rental car: 1
Number of diapers bummed from very kind strangers on the flight home: 4
Number of our children who exited the plane in either just a t-shirt and a diaper or a wet onesie: 2
Time Ezra and Reuben woke up this morning: 4:30am
Expected temperature today in Portland: 98

How I am so Tired.

That's my favorite topic of conversation these days. I'm sure it's very boring to listen to. But, god, it's the truth. Just so very tired. I remember a day about two weeks ago when I told Andrew that I was just so tired and I needed to catch up on some sleep. Every night since then, instead of catching up, the sleep deficit has gotten worse and worse. Like I said, really boring. But's that's what's going on.

What else is going on? Ezra is having a ball with a pair of scissors and a roll of blue painter's tape in his bedroom: taping things together, making a "mobile" and a "digger" out of tape and blocks and wrapping up toys in tape. Reuben, aka "Hollywood", is super smiley and talkative. And - dare I say it, as it's been a very rough road - Ezra is finally taking to his role of big brother. Poor peanut, it's been a hard few months for him.

Andrew's done with teaching and, with the weather finally cooperating, it feels like Summer is finally here! I hope this summer is full of farmer's markets, friends, water, laughter, swimming, cooking and, I just have to bring it up one more time, sleep.

(Calling A) Spade A Spade

I haven't been posting as much lately as I haven't had much free time (understatement!) to craft well-written blog posts. But, today, while I was lying on a massage table having my over-ergoed shoulder muscles kneaded, I realized that I miss posting. And I got to thinking about all the different kinds of posts I write here. While the more essay-like ones are fun and rewarding to write, I also enjoy the less-literary ones: tidbits of conversations we've had lately, links to things I'm finding interesting right now, cooking stuff, lists and photos. If I give myself more permission to post these kinds of more "fluffy" posts, I will post alot more. And, as this blog feels like both a creative outlet and a record of my life at this time- as a stay-at-home mama with two young boys- I want to update it as frequently as possible. I hope one day Ezra and Reuben will enjoy reading this - both to see a record of their childhoods and to learn a little more about their mama. I don't want to leave so many things out just because I don't have the time to write a "good" post about it. So - here we go - my posting standards have been lowered a little. Let's see what happens!

O-

Ba-Ma!