MamaPie

Mama 'n Ezra

Over the past week, Ezra and I have been able to spend some good, quality time just the two of us. On Sunday, when he was having a particularly rough day and Andrew, moreso than I, was having a hard time dealing with him, I decided that mama and Ezra were going swimming.

Now, for a part of me, this was the absolute last thing I felt like doing. I was exhausted (my general state of affairs lately), swimming is an ordeal even on the best of days (I know you other mamas know what I mean) and my back was aching. But, I know how much Ezra loves the water; I knew that physical activity was bound to help him shake off his bad mood and I also thought that some time together, just the two of us, doing something we used to do together B.R. (Before Reuben) would probably be just what he needed.

So, off to the pool we went. And we had a ball. We played, Ezra jumped into my arms, he practiced his kicking, paddling and bubbles and, for the first time, we went down the waterslide. Ten times we went: Ezra in my lap, my arms wrapped around his little wet body, me kissing his head as we raced along the slippery slide. It was just great.

And then, yesterday, we had mama 'n Ez baking time. This time we baked the coffee cake from this cookbook (which I got out of the library and have really been enjoying, so much so that I just ordered it from Amazon). We both remembered how our last baking adventure wasn't so much fun and Ezra ate less raw butter/batter/sugar and I remembered my sense of joy in baking together.

While the coffeecake baked, Ez and I dashed out to the last day of our local farmer's market where we ate blackberries and strawberries and listened to the Marimba band. We came back and had dinner and coffee cake, which was awesome.

Then, before bed, we turned the kitchen sink into a bathtub. Messy Kitchen=Fun Day.

 

 

"Fun" in the kitchen?

Oops. Did I say a cookie a week? That was sure optimistic (or out of touch with the reality of my current life). Let’s change that to “a baked good a month”. If we call it that, then we’re ahead of the game. About a month ago, Ezra and I baked banana bread and then, yesterday, we made buttermilk cookies.

 The banana bread was great, as always. It’s a whole wheat banana bread recipe from Butter Sugar Flour Eggs. It’s the only thing I’ve ever made out of that cookbook and it’s totally fantastic – made with whole wheat flour and honey (also sugar, but I use about half the amount called for). This baking episode was notable for the fact that Ezra baked naked. Some bakers wear aprons, other bakers wear nothing. You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

The buttermilk cookie recipe was from Gourmet. I don’t have much experience with buttermilk (besides making pancake batter a few times), but these just sounded good. Ezra and I didn’t have as much fun baking these together as we usually do. He was eating tons of the ingredients – chunks of butter, handfuls of sugar and big clumps of batter – and it was making me crazy: both with the thought of how intense it was for his little body to be ingesting all that and with the thought that his fast little paws were messing up the dynamics of the recipe! I kept asking him to stop and he kept stuffing more into his mouth until I finally got exasperated and told him that if he didn’t stop eating the batter he’d have to go to the other room. More batter eaten; Ezra banished to the living room. What a fun mama-son baking adventure, huh?

I felt badly because I’m usually a relaxed-in-the-kitchen mama. Honey dripping down the new cabinets? No biggie, we can clean it. Flour everywhere? Oh well. But this day, I couldn’t find a creative or relaxed way to get Ezra to stop eating large quantities of things that aren’t supposed to be eaten in large quantities (especially for little bodies), and so we had a baking adventure breakdown.

 A few minutes later, I heard Andrew reading Tell Me a Mitzi to Ezra in the living room, so I knew that things were back on track. I went in and gave Ezra a hug; Andrew told me that he and Ezra had talked about what had happened and that Ezra understood why I’d gotten frustrated and that Andrew understood why it was hard to stop eating batter. Understanding all around. And, a few minutes later, cookies all around, too. (Even though he’d eaten all those ingredients, I couldn’t deprive Ezra of a cookie. Enjoying the finished product – warm from the oven, with a glass of milk – is the great joy of baking.)

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.