mashed potatoes

This morning was the kind of morning that I've looked forward to having as I watch Daniel grow into more of a toddler. In short, we made mashed potatoes.

It was a messy morning that started with Daniel deciding he wanted to make some "soup." We went and sat in front of his play kitchen with a few carrot sticks, and I got out a couple of red potatoes I had on hand, and we used plastic ("safe") implements to try to cut up the potatoes, which took forever, but we finally accomplished it.

At one point, Daniel strained and grunted and said, "I can do it!" And then he popped his potato in half, and I was so proud of him.

We washed the potatoes and carrots in a strainer, then put them in some water to boil. A while later, when they were soft and cooled off, we sat on the floor and mashed them with a fork. Daniel added plenty of salt and pepper, and I added butter. And then we ate them (until Daniel poured his milk into them and made them all runny and then poured them all over his high chair tray).

The whole process held our attention for a good bit of the morning. I loved it. I love watching concepts click in his head. I love seeing his sense of accomplishment. I love that we can do things like this together now.

talking about cooking

Daniel has been having a word explosion lately. Today, he came up to me while I was looking something up in my Joy of Cooking cookbook and touched the red circle on the cover and said, "Joy." Which is rather appropos because he also loves being with me in the kitchen, helping ("cooking") in whatever way he can. He likes to stir the soup, whisk the eggs ("aggies," which he often requests for lunch) and move them around in the pan, and examine the contents of the refrigerator, especially around mealtimes: "Hummy" (hummous) and "Owange" are two of his favorites. Today I baked a pie ("pie"), and he made Steve hold him ("up" and "carry") while he watched every step of the process and ate some blueberries ("bo-bo"). He's napping now, but when he wakes up, we'll all have some pie. "Yummy!"

Addendum:

this and that

For the new year, we decided to join the 21st century and get DSL. It was a huge pain in the a$$ to install it on the Mac — involving hours of frustrating phone calls to mostly clueless tech support people at both Qwest and Apple to figure out how to configure the Mac's settings for this modem. In the end, the solution was easy and straightforward, but it wasn't written anywhere, and I had to glean clues as I went along and figure it out on my own, pretty much. (Oh, the hardships we Mac owners face in this Windows world!) Now that it's up and running, I love it. In fact, I can scarcely believe how fast and easy it is to get online! How on earth did I make it this long with just dial-up?

I am 28 weeks pregnant, with 12 weeks to go, and I have gained 11 pounds so far. Not even a dozen. I know it's partly due to the weight I lost during my surgery, but still. I gained nearly 50 pounds with Daniel, if not more. The midwife says it's perfectly fine, though, and the baby is certainly big and kicky enough, so I'm not worrying about it. And I passed my glucose tolerance test, which screens for gestational diabetes. My blood test (taken an hour after drinking down a glass of a very sugary drink) resulted in a score of 134. I needed 140 or lower ... so I passed, but just barely. With Daniel, my score was 96.

Our doula, who was with us when I had Daniel, is going to be joining us again for this birth, and I'm so excited! It was great to talk to her on the phone last night. She's had a second baby since Daniel was born, so we had plenty of notes to share on our feelings about adding another little one to the family. Like me, she said, it was hard for her at first to accept that her firstborn would never be the sole center of her mothering world again. In fact, she felt guilty about it for a while. I'm glad to hear it's a normal reaction. I've been following the blogs of friends like April, Sarah and Missy, who just added second children to their families (or Kerry, who added triplets), searching for insights on what it's like. All in all, our doula predicted, it'll probably be harder for me than for Daniel.

Last night, I was copying out a recipe for spaghetti pie that a friend had sent me — she'd brought it over while I was recovering from surgery, and all three of us loved it. As I wrote, the thought flashed through my mind: I'd better write this out really clearly so that in case I'm not around anymore, Steve will know how to follow these instructions. How many people have thoughts like that? I didn't, pre-cancer. Now, I have them almost every day. Like, I want to be optimistic and relaxed and live as if I have a long life ahead of me, but on the same token, I also want to be prepared for contingencies. Just in case. So I think about things like what recipes Steve can cook easily, whether he'll be able to follow my bill-filing system, what advice to give Daniel about meeting girls when he grows up. Things like that. Just in case I'm not there.

I told the above to Steve last night, and he said, "You mean, you aren't planning to stock up the freezer for us before you go?" And we had a good laugh. Thank God.

feast and family

This year, we had two Christmases — the big family gathering at Steve's dad's place on Christmas Day and a small family gathering of just the three (well, four) of us at home on Christmas Eve, when we opened our presents. Someone else is usually in charge of what we eat at the big feast, so even though Steve and I usually bring something to contribute, I don't really get to participate in the fun (and energy) of planning out a meal. I miss that sometimes — dreaming up side dishes to go with the ham or the turkey, mulling over cookbooks to find creative ways to do sweet potatoes or green vegetables. So this year, Steve and I began a Christmas Eve tradition of having our own private feast, just for the family. It doesn't have to be huge or perfect — just fun and delicious and maybe a little adventurous. To get in the spirit of it, I turned to one of my favorite cookbook authors, Nigella Lawson, who manages to be laid back about cooking even while she's passionate about it. For Christmas Eve, I browsed through her Feast and decided to go with sausages with onion-cider gravy and a mashed potato dish that also incorporates apples. That, and the Brussels sprouts cooked with pancetta and chestnuts. It was delicious; I nearly literally swooned when we finally sat down and started eating. For dessert, we just had a few slices of chocolate loaf cake that I'd made over the weekend (from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess). I've baked several batches of it throughout the fall, and it's my biggest addiction at the moment. I cannot stop at just one slice and sometimes have eaten half a loaf in one sitting. Let's hope I don't get gestational diabetes.

If Nigella Lawson is relaxed and laid back in her attitude to cooking, my other favorite cookbook is the opposite and appeals to an entirely different (read: obsessive) side of me. It's The New Best Recipe, by the editors of Cook's Illustrated magazine. These folks will test a recipe down to its bare bones before settling on the very best combination of ingredients and cooking techniques. It's fascinating and sometimes pretty funny to read their process as they haggle over the minutae of a recipe, often making it dozens of times and having testers taste each permutation. For sweet potatoes — which is what I made for the big family gathering yesterday — it was all about whether to boil the potatoes or bake them to get the best flavor out of them, and whether to cook them whole and scrape them out of their peels once cooked or cut them up ahead of time. Their conclusion: Cut them up raw and braise them in a pot with nothing but a small amount of butter and cream, thereby letting them cook in their own juices. (I used a variation with ginger and brown sugar.) This way, they say, you get the full-bodied sweet-potato flavor without watered-down mushiness. And what do you know? They were right.

In the picture: Here's Daniel, the youngest of the 12 cousins (so far) on Steve's side of the family, with the oldest cousin, Beth, who is a junior in college and studying to be a teacher. He loved her. All the cousins but one were together yesterday, which was a rare achievement. It was a beautiful day — snowy but not too cold — and all the kids were red-faced and sweaty after coming in from ice skating on the pond outside the house. It was nice and relaxing, a very good Christmas.

potato-leek soup

Teresa was from Spain. She had dark brown hair cut in one of those simple, short styles that look chic on European women but frumpy on me. She had the knack for finding the one cool, whimsical pair of earrings in an antique shop full of junky knick-knacks. She spoke English with an exotic accent and showed us artistic pictures she'd taken of her American boyfriend on vacation on Majorca. She seemed so sophisticated. I was a little in awe of her. She and her boyfriend were part of a group of friends of an ex-boyfriend of mine, a guy who was all wrong for me, though at the time I clung to him, embarrassingly, like a codependent fool. One Thanksgiving, the year I was 23, we drove up to Champaign-Urbana, where he had a friend in grad school, to spend the long weekend with them. I'd never met them before then. They were funny and friendly, well-traveled and intellectual, hipsters in an almost nerdy way, and we spent the weekend cooking, going to antique shops, talking about books ... just talking, talking, talking. I'd have enjoyed myself immensely if I hadn't been obsessing over the fact that they all had known my predecessor quite well and worrying that I didn't measure up to her. I ended up never seeing them again because the boyfriend and I broke up not long after that. But something good came from it because it was that weekend when I learned to make this soup.


Teresa made it for one of our meals that weekend. She didn't use a recipe but directed us as some of us peeled potatoes and others washed the sandy insides of the leeks. The simple soup is a staple of French cuisine, I have since learned, and is served hot or cold (which makes it Vichyssoise). All I knew then was that it was hearty and delicious, perfect for a chilly fall weekend in the Midwest. So good, in fact, that everybody pestered her for the recipe. I scribbled down notes on a piece of looseleaf notebook paper as Teresa — occasionally grasping for the proper terms in English — took us through the process. It's a pretty easy soup to make. She explained how to separate the layers of leeks to get them completely clean. She told us to sauté the onion and leeks under a "low fire" until they were "translucent." To cut up the potatoes into small pieces and add them, and the beef broth ("consumée"), cooking them until the potato falls apart easily when you press it against the side of the pot with the back of your wooden spoon.

The sheet of paper has become messy and stained with time, and I don't bother to pull it out anymore because it's mostly in my head. Over the years, I have fiddled with the recipe, sometimes upping the number of leeks, sometimes using chicken broth instead of beef broth, sometimes skipping the onion altogether, sometimes, throwing in garlic and various spices. A few years ago, I saw a similar recipe in one of Jamie Oliver's cookbooks, but he added chick peas, so now I often do that, too. Tonight, I mashed six cloves of garlic through the garlic press and scraped them into the pot to sauté with the leeks and added two teaspoons of coriander because I was curious how it would affect the flavor. It wasn't bad. In fact, I think Teresa would be proud.

nesting

In the past couple of days, I've been preoccupied by kitchen stuff. I pore over cookbooks obsessively, and I've spent several hours online trying to decide whether to upgrade my cake pans. Yesterday I spent the entire afternoon baking a chocolate torte with buttercream frosting (which originally was just supposed to be the filling, but I had enough to frost the entire torte, so I skipped the glaze and used the frosting). It's sinfully delicious and probably not good for me, but that's what I've been in the mood for, so I'm unapologetic. I keep telling the Lemmondrop, "This could be your birthday cake, if you come today! There's still plenty left!" Of course, he's getting his share of it anyway. He gets a bit kicky when I eat a lot of sweets. I can tell that he's going to take after his dad — a total sweet tooth.

When I'm not thinking about food or bakeware, I am reading. Sometimes it's baby books, but I've laid off those this week, perhaps to sooth my impatience. This morning, I finished the latest novel on my nightstand, which has prompted me to revisit Jane Austen, if I can decide which book. Emma, maybe. Or Mansfield Park. It's shorter. Meanwhile, I've redone the sidebar of this blog. Instead of listing all my favorite books (which feels so long and cumbersome and incomplete anyway), I'm listing all the books I've read this year. Books I don't finish, or use as reference, don't make the list. I feel like I've forgotten some from the beginning of the year, but it's a pretty good record of 2006 so far.

The thing is, I'm going to have little time to cook, bake or read Jane Austen once the Lemmondrop is born. I know that. I feel as if this week is my last chance to do these things for a long time, so I'm soaking it up. I feel like I'm in some strange limbo-land, on this giant, new threshhold of life — not going to work, yet not really on maternity leave. I don't know what to do with myself with all this time of waiting. It's hard to go for walks, and I have run out of errands. So there's cooking and reading, things I can do without leaving the house or even taking a shower. (Today is the Feast of the Assumption, and Steve and I will probably go to church tonight. Hooray — an outing!) The empty Pack & Play sits next to our bed, and it's hard for me to fathom that in a matter of days, I will be lying in the dark, listening to the breathing of another person, my world wrapped up in a whole new skill set of breastfeeding and diaper-changing and giving baths.

Last night, the Lemmondrop was unusually quiet, and I had a little emotional breakdown over it. Even a big glass of water, followed by cold milk, didn't rouse him like it usually does, and I lay on my side for what seemed like eternity waiting for him to wake up, like he always does. I poked him in the places where I think his knees or feet or butt are, which usually makes him squirm, but there was nothing. Finally, he seemed to stretch a little, and I was able to relax. (And, therefore, so was Steve, whose attempts to comfort me were mostly unsuccessful until then.) By the time I was falling asleep, he was moving around like crazy. I know this is not going to let up anytime soon. I am going to worry about this little boy all his life. I just hope I don't smother him!

The itching seems to have let up a little. I don't have the big white welts anymore. I have some lingering tiny red scabs, but even those are fading. I still scratch myself a lot, especially at night, when I notice it the most. Keeping busy helps. But maybe the worst of it is over.

scratching that itch

(Edited to add a somewhat gross picture of my leg ...)

Yesterday morning, I was up at 6:30 a.m. making blueberry scones. I was making a racket all over the kitchen, but Steve was sleeping so soundly that he didn't hear a thing. He loves scones — they bring back memories of relaxing afternoon teatimes in Ireland, like that late afternoon when we checked into our B&B in Cork, and the first thing the owner did was shuttled us into the parlor and put a tray of tea, coffee, scones and pastries down in front of us. We'd been driving all day to get to Cork from just outside Dublin, and this felt like heaven. Bliss. Ever since then, scones have held a special place in Steve's heart.

The trick to making scones, I have learned through trial and error, is to not overwork the butter in the dough. It should go in cold and pebbly and have the appearance of peas. I think I nailed it yesterday because these scones were just the way I like them: crispy on the outside, flaky on the inside. By the time Steve got up at 8:30, there were two dozen hot scones cooling off on various racks and plates around the kitchen and coffee in the pot. It was the kind of Saturday morning I'd love to have every weekend — although without the lower backache that comes from working in the kitchen while nearly 39 weeks pregnant. And without the itchies.

The reason I was up at 6:30 a.m. in the first place — I, who usually can sleep until 9 or 10 — is that over the past three or four days, I have developed PUPPP. (Or so the OB diagnosed it, and the stuff I've found on the Internet seems to confirm it.) Short for pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy (which I prefer to translate into English as "incredibly, nightmarishly itchy, rashy skin in pregnant women"), it's a condition that occasionally pops up in the third trimester. I tell you, this itching is keeping me awake at night more than my big belly and the multiple trips to the bathroom ever did. It just won't go away, and it pops up in new places every day, and at this point, I don't know how I'm going to make it through the next week (and possibly more, if I go over my due date). I would welcome the pains of labor over this. (Famous last words?)

It started four or five days ago on my belly, in the creases of my stretch marks. I thought it was just my skin reacting to even more stretching, so I put a lot of lotion on it and tried (not very successfully) not to scratch it. Then I started to notice a rash on my arms and thighs that was also very itchy. It starts off looking like bug bites and then turns red bumps, probably because I scratch it. When I double-checked my belly, I realized it had the rash, too, and this was where it was itching. Now it's under my breasts, too, and creeping up the backs of my hands to my fingers and down my thighs to my calves. When is it going to stop?

After I give birth, that's when it will stop. There is no known cure except just having the baby. And this Lemmondrop has not dropped, is not engaged, and my cervix is dilated not one whit, though it has softened about 50 percent (at least that's something), so who knows when he might come? Hopefully on time, but I can't count on it!

A couple of months ago, I had what (in retrospect) was a mild precursor to this. The doctor drew some blood to check my liver functions and was able to rule out a rare, more serious liver condition that would have been bad. The itching itself went away with a few days of Benadryl and calamine lotion. These days, those things only give some temporary relief, sometimes.

I've learned some interesting stuff online:

• PUPPP normally occurs in first pregnancies during the third trimester with an average onset of 35 weeks. Thankfully, PUPPP does not usually affect subsequent pregnancies.

• The cause of PUPPP is unknown. It is not associated with preeclampsia, autoimmune disorders, hormonal abnormalities, or fetal abnormalities. And it's not harmful to the baby. It just itches like the devil.

• One study has shown that male fetal DNA can be found in skin biopsies of the rash. Since 70% of women with PUPPP give birth to boys, a new hypothesis is that male fetal DNA acts as a skin irritant. (Makes sense — I am having a boy.)

I also found this Web site by a writer who had PUPPP and has collected as many relief remedies as she can for other PUPPP sufferers. (Can we call ourselves PUPPPies?) :) At any rate, I've tried a few of them, including an Aveeno oatmeal bath this morning, which brought some mild relief that has since gone away. As I type this, I feel like bug bites are erupting all over me, and I stop every minute or so to scratch something. I know I shouldn't scratch, but I can't help it. I also don't like to complain too much — I am so fortunate and grateful for this pregnancy and this baby whom we will be meeting soon. But this just sucks.

For breakfast this morning, I ate about six scones. Even a day old, they were so satisfying. I hear it's a good idea to load up on carbs when you know you have a baby coming. It's the same philosophy marathon runners have, which is why they eat spaghetti the night before a marathon. So I'm not going to worry about the scones. I want all the energy I can build up for the Lemmondrop's birthday!

In the meantime, please send encouragement and anti-itch vibes. I could really use them right now. :)

how i cook

So here's what transpired Saturday night:

Steve: What should we do for dinner?

Me: We have some chicken we need to use up.

Steve: I can dice it up for you. Should we stir-fry it with some of those [frozen organic] vegetables?

Me: Sure. [Checks cupboard.] Shoot, I was in the mood to use coconut milk, but we're out. Hey, we do have this jar of Alfredo sauce. Could we do some sort of chicken Alfredo?

Steve: What about the vegetables?

Me: Well, maybe we could still sauté the veggies with the chicken and mix in the Alfredo sauce and have a really chunky sauce and have it with fettucini noodles. We still have half a box of those.

Steve: Uh ... OK.

[We start to work on it. Steve empties the jar of Alfredo sauce into the pan with the chicken and vegetables.]

Me: I don't think this is enough sauce. I wonder if we have any more. [Checks cupboard again.] Hey, check this out. It's a jar of sun-dried tomato pesto. It's been here for ages. I think it might have been a wedding shower gift?! Should I dump it in?

Steve: Uh ... I guess you could.

Me: [Sniffing] Do you think it's still good? It's probably three years old, at least.

Steve: [Sniffs] I don't smell anything wierd. It's probably OK.

[I dump in the jar, and Steve stirs it all in. The sauce is now a very light orange.]

Me: Maybe this could use some oregano. [Shakes some in] And here's a jar of Italian herbs ...

Steve: This smells pretty good!

[The noodles finish cooking, so we drain them, fill up our plates and sit down to eat.]

The verdict: Fantastico! We could not have come up with a better summer pasta dish (in my humble opinion!) if I'd scoured a dozen cookbooks.

More often than not, this is how meals often come together in our kitchen — especially on those days when I'm too tired to go shopping with a long, complicated grocery list. (I should mention that Steve, while perfectly willing to help out, is not a big cook.) Occasionally, I'll flip open my copy of How to Cook Everything to brush up on something basic, like the best way to sauté pork chops. Then I'll figure out what's in the cupboard, what's in the refrigerator, and what might go together decently. The results are hit or miss, but more often than not, they're pretty good. Sometimes surprisingly so! In those cases, I try to jot down what I did so I can duplicate it someday.

That's what I plan to do with this one. I just wonder if it has an actual name — if I could order it in a restaurant or something. And where does a person find a good jar of sun-dried tomato pesto? I suppose I could make it myself ... but knowing me, I'm a lot more likely to use it if I find it sitting unopened in the cupboard some lazy Saturday afternoon.