He's back!

And he appears to be slightly acidic.

Food for a hot climate, on a cold day

cellophane noodles after soaking

When local vegetables are scarce and the winter grows long, I sometimes turn to Asian cooking. Perhaps just thinking about a hot climate makes me feel better. My favorite two cookbooks along these lines are both by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid and are called Hot Sour Salty Sweet (about Southeast Asia) and Mangoes and Curry Leaves (about the Indian subcontinent). Alford and Duguid also have a relatively new book on cuisine from the outlying provinces of China, but I don't own that one yet.

I have had my eye on Mangoes and Curry Leaves for some time now, but only bought it last week after reading a short story, "Mrs. Sen's" by Jhumpa Lahiri. The story is about the Indian wife of a math professor who is stuck in a university apartment in the United States, far from her home and extended family, with no friends, no children of her own, and little comfort from her husband. Homesick, she puts all her energy into cooking, which the American boy she babysits (who is also the narrator) describes in detail. Not only could I sympathize with Mrs. Sen, I got terribly hungry reading the story and ordered Mangoes and Curry Leaves from my local bookstore the very next day. Next thing you know we're eating yogurt-marinated chicken for dinner, along with a lime-drizzled salad and unripe mango salsa.

Today was a pouring rain day, a Monday, with no lunch handy, and CZ was taking her geometry midterm. Since we'd be home all day, I started some chicken stock, but then decided we also needed something comforting for lunch, so I made Vietnamese chicken soup with greens from Hot Sour Salty Sweet. All this takes that's out of the ordinary is a pack of cellophane noodles, some fish sauce, and a bit of extra time to cook and shred the chicken.

You cook about a pound of chicken (any type, so long as you remove the skin and fat and eventually the bones) in 6 c. broth for thirty minutes, then shred and remove the chicken to soup bowls once it's soft.

Meanwhile soak the cellophane noodles in warm water for twenty minutes and cut them into 2-4" lengths (I soon figured out why 2" was really better--it made them a lot easier to eat with a spoon!).

Chop either bok choy or chard into 1" bits. The recipe says to remove the stems, but I didn't.

Add 3 T. fish sauce, season, and add the noodles and vegetables to the broth. Bring to a boil, stir, and ladle the broth mixture over the chicken.

CZ and I found that salt in both broth and fish sauce was a little too salty for our tastes, but it might be just the thing for someone with a sore throat. In fact, the soup was a bit like a healthier version of the old Campbell's Chicken and Stars that my mom used to give me when I got sick as a child. The noodles are made of mung beans, so they're healthy, too. And if you make your own stock and add some vegetables, you can see how this is a winner for a cold day, a rainy day, exam day, sick day, or any combination thereof!

Chicken soup with greens (in this case, bok choy). You can barely see the noodles, but they're there!

Meanwhile, Bob was giving me funny looks yesterday for what turned out to be an all-vegetarian weekend (he's really a good sport, but I find he sometimes has to supplement dinner with a bowl of cereal), so I think I'll surprise him with some cumin and coriander burgers for dinner tonight, adapted from Mangoes and Curry Leaves.

Tomorrow will be colder and clear, and we'll be out and about a lot more, so this was a great "inside day" for cooking. Enjoy those days when they come!

A musical request, in good form

Yesterday I sat down at the computer to find this request from CZ. This is a very CZ thing to do, in several different ways. But even I didn't understand the full significance of it at first. Any guesses, musicians?

She got a further laugh when Bob came home, asked, "What's this?" and absent-mindedly tried to point to the sticky note with the mouse. We've really come to depend on that Mac note widget.

The concertmaster and one of the flutists in this orchestra are very supportive musical friends, by the way. I suspect that Arvo Part and the Vaughan Williams violin solo also have something to do with the urgency of the request.

Harbor Herons redux

As you may know, we spent two (very) full days each month from July until October surveying heron foraging habits for NYC Audubon. Kate Ruskin and other people who work at NYC Audubon are now tallying all the volunteers' results and they hope to issue a report soon about their findings. Meanwhile, another Audubon volunteer, Sandra Koponen, has spent hours this year shooting footage and compiling this video about conservation efforts in CZ's and my very own volunteer location, Jamaica Bay!

If you watch the video, you'll see many of the very same points we surveyed in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. No, we're not in the video, but we're excited about the work that others are doing, because we love this part of New York City and we want it to be preserved for future generations of New Yorkers--not to mention the birds!

Spread the news--stay home!

I love this Bravewriter post so much that I'm not only going to put it in my shared items sidebar, I'm going to make a post about it, however brief.

Back in the early days of home education, I read a long treatise on why parents ought to stay home, in the house, with their kids. The writer talked about rhythms and routines, modeling all kinds of life skills (plumbing and baking, creating a shopping list and sewing on buttons, filling the bird feeders and using the drill). She urged long sessions of reading aloud and leaving time for dress-ups and Legos, lying on a couch bored, face painting and knitting. She emphasized how busy-ness leads to a habit of breaking concentration, of not deeply investing in any one moment, project, or playtime because inside the child knows that that activity is about to be interrupted by another trip out the door.

With little kids, I had no trouble taking the “stay-at-home” advice to heart, though. We had one vehicle that I didn’t get to drive on week days, we didn’t own a TV, and the World Wide Web hadn’t been invented. So we stayed in, or we played on the front steps. But the pace of life, even with small kids, was slow. There were hours wasted on diaper changes, walks around the cul-de-sac, making muffins and taking naps. We read tons of picture books (took a laundry basket to the library and loaded up) and made play-doh from scratch.

And then, the world sped up. Cell phones, cable TV, Netflix (DVDs sent right to your door!), the Internet, two cars! The next thing I knew, the options of what I could do in and outside my tiny condominium with or for my kids flooded my life. Some of you only know homeschooling within that context of high-speed, 24/7 connections to All the Great Things to Do Every Day! You see and hear ads, you join email lists, you get calls from friends at any time of day. And of course, homeschooling itself has exploded in popularity in the last 20 years so there are more ways to spend your time and money than ever before (and plenty of advice that if you don’t do X, your child won’t be ready for Y!).

If you choose to homeschool, let’s put the home before school. What is home exactly?

If you choose to homeschool, let's put the home before school. That's exactly what I am trying to convey in almost every post in my blog, however inarticulately. As we've started high school, the home part of homeschooling feels beleaguered like never before. Sometimes I feel like our family is in a small dingey in an open sea. Actually, we're in a small apartment in the middle of a competitive city, but the effect is the same. Despite feeling threatened at times by the prevailing culture, I pray that I'll be able to provide some sense of refuge, some sense of space and leisure, some sense of home. And I find that more often that not, that sense of refuge comes not from doing more, but from doing less. It's harder to do less! But it's worth it.

Spread the news.

In the (not always) Bleak Midwinter

A winter candle from that lovely store, Helix, in Athens, GA

This is our home in midwinter:

In the mornings I have shifted my reading spot from the sofa, where I used to watch the sun rise over the tenement behind us, to the green chair. Now that it's getting light later, I need to turn on a lamp, and since we keep our living room curtains open, this chair with its reading lamp both affords me more privacy and bothers the neighbors less.

It's about 7 a.m. and just getting light. By April it will get light at 4:30 a.m.

I got the lamp for Christmas, from my mother-in-law! We purchased another comfy chair when we got rid of our TV this fall, but it isn't here yet. (Long story.) Now we'll have lamps for both chairs. That's important in winter.

What I hear:

The crackling and spitting of the radiator beside me, trash truck brakes and motor outside, a traffic helicopter, muffled feet upstairs, and the elevator cables rattling a bit behind our stove.

What I am thinking about:

"Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters...Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stand or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

"Each man should be fully convinced in his own mind...for none of us lives to himself alone...If we live, we live to the Lord..." (Mostly from Romans 14)

I am thinking about the difference between networks and communities, and between communities and the Body of Christ. If I ever get my thoughts into any sort of organized form, I may post them. Meanwhile, I recommend John Taylor Gatto's excellent essay on the difference between networks and communities. But the Body of Christ comes first, even before a real community. And I'm not at all sure that the Body of Christ functions like a fellowship group, as important and enjoyable as those can be.

Winter food:

This is the opposite season, foodwise, from my midsummer post on tomatoes. This week I saw a photo of a single cherry tomato and a bit of balsamic vinegar on an empty plate and was filled with a terrible longing for summer, complete with the smell of basil and the sense of a warm wind on my face during an outdoor meal. The rest of my family, all two of them fanatical Nordic skiing aficionados, don't get my nostalgia about warm weather, which starts right after Christmas and increases until May. But there it is.

So, if like me, you're experiencing nostalgia for tomatoes, here's a recipe from The Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics (pg. 183) that I made last week. Ina Garten is right when she says that it makes dull supermarket plum tomatoes develop the intense flavor of summer tomatoes:

12 plum tomatoes

1/4 C. good olive oil

1 1/2 T. aged balsamic vinegar

2 large garlic cloves, miced

2 t. sugar

1 1/2 t. kosher salt

1/2 t. freshly ground black pepper

10 large basil leaves, julienned

Preheat oven at 450 degrees.

Arrange tomatoes on a sheet pan, cut sides up, in a single layer. Drizzle with the olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Sprinkle with garlic, sugar, salt, and pepper. Roast for 25 to 30 minutes, until the tomatoes start to caramelize and the flavors are concentrated. Sprinkle the basil on top and serve warm or at room temperature. Serves 4 to 5. (In our case, it served 3!)

This is not to say, however, that I can't appreciate winter. In fact, it's the subject of this whole post! Right now, I am finding 101 uses for carrots, since that's what's left from my last CSA bag. Last night I made prosciutto roasted bass with autumn roasted vegetables. It used three whole carrots!

Evenings:

For years, Bob came home at 9 p.m., so I got to be rather artful at appreciating the quiet cheer of an evening alone with one child, in an apartment. It gets dark at 4:30 in New York City during December, so I light candles in preparation for Christmas. Bob is coming home earlier now, and it's even staying light a little later, but still our winter patterns prevail.

Here's a photo of a typical winter evening at our home. CZ is practicing for a competition--or perhaps I should say that she's avoiding practicing for a competition. Chances are about 5 to 1 she is playing Saint-Saens, Sibelius, Bernstein...anything but her unaccompanied Bach! She may have just finished her schoolwork, come home from her violin lesson, or she may have been reading or knitting. She's a fan of the current fashion of wearing long sweaters with short boots, which, along with her small size and penchant for rereading Lord of the Rings, makes her appear something like a hobbit or hobbit/elf combo. It feels quiet at home, even though it isn't exactly quiet. I'm usually cooking on the other side of the room in our open kitchen. And yes, those lights in the window are from other apartments.

You can also see that I was loath to take down the tree. We didn't do so until this Saturday. Also, you can see that I left our books from the day on the various chairs where we put them. And that CZ has a thing about warming her hands by the space heater, even though our radiator is over-zealous and it's well above 70 degrees inside.

When Bob comes home, the atmosphere changes immediately. He comes in the door speaking Italian, which causes CZ to groan. Sometimes they start playing chess, which is a surprisingly noisy game the way they play it. For the past two nights it's been accompanied by Shakespeare lyrics sung to our Twelfth Night CD. CZ enjoys matching Anne Hathaway's soprano, but Bob, who has currently lost his voice, prefers to butcher both the tune and lyrics. "Tell me where is fancy bred?" becomes "Tell me where is...fancy bread?" Somehow this usually ends up in some kind of dancing, nerf murder-football, kinesthetically watching ski or cycling championships on You Tube, or gymnastic demonstrations, often with both parties talking over my book, by 10 p.m.

In three or four years, this all will change--I don't know how exactly. Our years of homeschooling an only child will be over, and that's as it should be. But for now I'm just trying to appreciate the moment, whether winter or summer, while it lasts.

Books for 2009

I strongly believe that the number of books one reads in a year is less relevant than what one remembers of them by the end of it. So, what do I remember of my reading for 2009?

I read more fiction and narrative than usual, so vivid images and characters remain in my mind: A childlike man rowing a boat on a lake as he imagines his own magical and unsupportable reality, and another lying injured and exposed on an arctic plateau for months. A woman whose impetuosity is polished by faith into courage as she suffers from the echoes of a youthful indiscretion. Because much of my fiction this year had a Norwegian or Scandinavian setting, I imagine scenes of sunlight slanting wanly on snowy mountains in winter, tiny isolated villages in which the women knit and the men ski and cut wood, with echoes loneliness and paganism.

As for the non-fiction I'm realizing that it takes a lot these days to make a light, topical book like In Defense of Food or Under Pressure memorable for me. I've been reading this type of book for so long now that many of the principles in them are running together. They are good principles, but these books often originate as good journalistic essays which are then expanded beyond their scope and don't satisfy as full-length books. Still, they usually read fast, and I like the genre that tries to make some sense of modern life in its current iterations, so I will continue to look for good examples. I wonder, though, how much our present publishing practices are to blame for watered down topical non-fiction.

Paul Johnson's history books, despite being 1000 pages each, are never an example of watered-down writing. Johnson's strength is presenting broad themes amidst thousands of details and biographical anecdotes. From A History of the American People I remember in particular the image of Thomas Jefferson at his desk as President, available to take on any and all visitors. That is about as clear a picture of how our country has changed during its history as any I can imagine.

And then there are the classics. I always try to read a few each year. Some of them were hard to get through in doctors' waiting rooms or in between homeschooling and homemaking, but even if they aren't "fun" at the time, they leave an impression that is worth the effort. Most of them should be read again, but realistically, I know that not all of them will be.

I had to take the end of Augustine's Confessions one sentence at a time. It was almost pure philosophy, but produced a state of mind that was clear and appreciative of every elementary aspect of existence.

Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare. Seeing his plays produced in Central Park is one of the highlights of our summer, so one or all of us usually reads the featured play. This year I'm really enjoying my new HEM CD of the songs from Twelfth Night, as performed in the Delacorte Theatre production this summer. And CZ is playing them on her fiddle and new Irish flute. Last night we got to talking about how so many of the song lyrics in this comedy are about mortality. Thinking about the whole scope of life while the play leads up to a wedding is surprisingly invigorating and moving, not morbid.

What I appreciated most about The Education of Henry Adams was his first person accounts of the events and people of his time, related not from the 30,000 foot perspective of history, but seemingly as they were unfolding. (This was not actually the case, because he wrote the book many years after the most of the events, but his descriptions are still fresh.) His philosophy seemed cynical, more obscure, and was somewhat lost on me. I read up on it in Wikipedia, but it didn't interest me as much as the historical vignettes.

I was startled at the transparent arrogance and childishness of James Watson in The Double Helix. People should read this book only if to realize that famous scientists aren't always the superheroes that we make them out to be. But I learned a something about chemistry, too.

Uncle Tom's Cabin wasn't about an obsequious slave as I'd been led to believe. It was about a man with strong Christian faith, but the writing was almost so sentimental as to detract from Tom's piety. I read this book only out of solidarity, because CZ had to read it over Christmas for a class. But I'm glad I did, because I had misunderstood the book.

And then there's I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which makes the excellent point that people should probably carefully consider what their motives are in dating when they're nowhere near ready to marry. I could hardly get through the intensity of Harris's writing; It makes me glad I'm not twenty-one anymore. But the longer I live, the more I thank God for my husband and also realize that Harris is basically right.

Here's the full list. I have decided to make this a yearly tradition, because it gives me somewhere to put the list that's usually growing on my sidebar during the year:

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes, Kenneth Myers (second time)

An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The Lord of the Flies, William Golding

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

Confessions, St. Augustine

Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino

Chance, Joseph Conrad

Montaigne, Selected Essays, "On the Education of Children" (not whole book)

Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, Sigrid Undset

Keeping House, Margaret Kim Peterson

Mindset, Carol Dweck

Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto (second time)

Twelfth Night, Shakespeare

Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wife, Sigrid Undset

Under Pressure, Carl Honore

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Kristin Lavransdatter: The Cross, Sigrid Undset

Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford

Nightbirds on Nantucket, Joan Aiken

A Room with a View, E.M. Forster

The Education of Henry Adams

Distracted, Maggie Jackson

The Birds, Tarjei Vesaas

Do Hard Things, Alex and Brett Harris

For the Children's Sake, Susan Schaeffer Macaulay

Memoir on Pauperism, by Alexis de Tocqueville (booklet)

A History of the American People, Paul Johnson

We Die Alone, David Howarth

Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper

Hundred Dollar Holiday, Bill McKibben

ISI Student Guides, various authors and lengths

The Snoring Bird, Bernd Heinrich

I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris

Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Double Helix, James Watson