pat: “these go against every fiber of my being…but i like them.”

i mean, come on! if that’s not a glowing endorsement, i don’t know what is. this is the easiest, quickest, and most surprisingly delicious dish imaginable. niamh likes it, and i think rowan will too, given time (he’s infuriatingly resistant to any and every new food). it would be a perfect food for babies who have moved beyond the pureed food stage!

so, compliments of my new favorite food blog, orangette, here is the “recipe” (in quotes because it’s so easy and mindless it can hardly be called a recipe):

-drain and rinse a can of chickpeas (molly at orangette says that the best chickpeas are goya, trader joe’s or bush)
-drizzle on some olive oil to taste (i am fairly generous, and like a bit of a puddle when the chickpeas are gone)
-grate some parmesan cheese, to taste (again, i am fairly generous because can you ever have too much cheese?)
-add about 1 tsp of fresh lemon juice
-salt to taste

mix it all together and voila–lunch, light dinner, snack, side dish, or baby food! you can serve it room temp. or chilled. i passionately hate cold bean salads, so i eat it at room temp.

btw, this is a recipe where there are so few ingredients that it’s vital to use the best you can of everything. this would be a good time to use that fancy olive oil!

i think there will be a lot of future blog posts about recipes i’ve made from orangette. she (molly) has great pics already, so it seems kind of silly to do my own, but what the heck. it’s fun!

I’m just now getting to this.. It’s been a busy week. Anyway. The pie-off went really well! Let’s see if I can remember all of the pies that were there. I brought a hideous looking smoked salmon cheesecake, David brought a very tasty broccoli pie, Amy brought a very labor intensive (and so worth it!) risotto pie, Bethany made a cottage pie and a banana cream pie, Jenny made a strawberry pie (which was her first American pie – great job!), Eve made a bumbleberry pie and Melissa brought a pumpkin per Mel’s request and a german chocolate pie. Oh, and last but not least, Jay brought a blackberry pie. The hostess kind. Amy I missing any? We ate like kings, if I do say so myself. Bethany even had the neat idea of making mixed drinks that were pie inspired and she even had some recipes but I think everyone was just too full to fit anything else in!

Now I’m trying to think of another themed dinner. Any ideas? All recipes from our mothers? All slow cooker foods?

More photos of our pie fun can be found here.

i frequently have extremely long and difficult days where it’s taken all the patience i can muster not to toss both kids out the window. poor pat trudges home from work, and upon opening the door gets nothing more than a grumbling growl from me as a hello, before i tell him he’s got the kids and i’m going to lay down (door shut and locked, no less).

on days like this it’s very sweet to snuggle up in the rocking chair with my two year old just before i tuck her into bed, and look down into her eyes as she sings lullabies with me, off-key and words all jumbled (in all honesty, i suppose it might also be that it’s finally bedtime). a good thing they have their cute moments.

niamh also often sings in her stroller throughout the store as i do the grocery shopping. really, she just sings a lot (and so does rowan for that matter, but we’ll just stick to niamh in this post).

today she found a new occasion to sing songs for–pooping. is that TMI? fall into the category of things that people without children dread hearing about from their friends with children? a thousand very sincere apologies, but i can’t resist. becoming a parent definitely makes poop a little more common place than maybe it should be in polite society. i think some of the things that ro loved most about ireland were the cow and sheep poop. the boy runs screaming to the car as if he’s being chased by a swarm of flies (haha) when i point out dolphins swimming in the bay (one of the funniest things i’ve seen in a while, by the way), but animal poop? i can barely tear him away.

anyway, to the tune of Frère Jacques (more or less), here is niamh’s poop song:

“nya-nya poop poop, nya-nya poop poop, nya-nya poop!”

“nya-nya” is how she says niamh, or neevie as we often call her.

We (here in Seattle) have hatched a plan for an all pie meal that’s going to be happening on Sunday. Am I a total nerd for being excited about this? I can’t wait to see what people bring and I’ve been totally obsessed looking for recipes for savory pies. There are so many options, it’s hard to narrow it down. Nothing so far has jumped out to me as the perfect savory pie but I’m hoping to find a good one especially since this is supposed to be a whole pie meal. For my first attempt at this I figure I probably shouldn’t just make something up.  A few people are doing sweet pies so it’ll be a whole meal!

i’ve been meaning to post about this for a while. last year jody was sweet enough to send us a tortilla press and i’ve been making my own tortillas at least a couple of times a month for the past three or four months. tortillas are sold here, but they are pretty nasty, so i’d rather not eat them. anything that has a shelf life longer than a month after it’s been opened is darn sketchy in my book. i use this recipe from epicurious–a million times better than anything store bought!

the tortilla press, if anyone is curious, works fairly well, though it’s not a perfect one step process. i actually wonder if tortilla presses are designed more for corn tortillas, because the size ours makes would be just right for a corn tortilla. too bad that masa flour is nowhere to be found, or i’d give those a try! anyway, what i end up doing is putting the ball of dough into the press, getting it nice and flat and round, and then rolling it out to the size of a small flour tortilla. i find it works better for me this way, because if i try to roll out the dough without the press, the tortillas are completely misshapen.

pat had a lot of fun helping me get this photo.

him: “you want to stand topless where?!”
me: “i need the lighting from the window.”

*bicker, bicker, bicker*

him: “fine, whatever.”
.
.
.
me: “be sure to stand very still.”

me: “more back showing.”

me: “less back showing.”

me: “no, that’s too much back.”

me: “um…sorry, that’s too little back.”

me: “the angle is wrong. move the camera.”

etc., etc., etc. i let him stop after about 150 photos just before the smoke began pouring from his ears. still not quite what i was looking for, but close enough. i need a better tripod. and better spatial awareness to arrange myself in the frame. oh well. i don’t plan on doing any self portraits outside of pregnancy.

on a side note, i don’t think my belly has gotten much bigger since the last photo. though i have gained a lot of weight, just not in the stomach area.

rowan has a fever today and has been absolutely pathetic.

we are supposed to leave for ireland on thursday.

what do you think the chances are that we all catch whatever he has and it runs it’s course before thursday?

dang it.

i’m sure many of you have seen it (especially since he’s local and all), but just in case, here’s a link to matt’s dancing 2008 video.

i was worried that my prolific tears were a sign that i really was about to lose it, but after reading many of the comments on his blog i see that it’s not a totally uncommon reaction.

though i am still a bit puzzled as to why the video made me cry. i’d had a bad day, so maybe that was part of it? i don’t know. anyway, i’m not feeling too keen on self-introspection at the moment, so i think i’ll leave that particular mystery alone.

so a couple of sessions ago my french tutor spent most of our hour and a half together talking about random things, rather than teaching (i will stay on topic and not go on about how irritated i was by this). random swiss things, for the most part. one of which was immigrants in lausanne and how that effects the schools (she works with school kids in the afternoons). i guess there is a pretty big refugee population from places such as africa, eastern europe, and the middle east.

and for the record, the following comments about refugees are all her observations only. i’m just repeating what she said and have no opinion on the subject of refugee immigrants in switzerland. i don’t even know if what she said is accurate. in fact, it is beside the point, as you will see in a moment.

anyway, she was talking about boys from muslim backgrounds and said that they have no respect for women and don’t pay attention to female teachers. she goes on to say how these teenage boys understand that muslim girls, covered from head to toe, are strictly off limits. but that they have a hard time keeping their hands off of the more provocatively dressed european girls. consequently, rape is becoming a big problem.

and then, after seeing my obvious distress over this tidbit of information, she said that it was of course the girls’ fault too, for dressing in such a provocative manner. which was apparently supposed to relieve my worries (not for myself mind you, but for my two daughters who might end up going to high school in switzerland), because (i assume), i as a responsible parent would never allow my girls to dress provocatively.

!!!!!! ?????? !!!!!!

surely i’m not the only one who finds that fairly appalling? how is rape ever a woman’s fault?

On Tuesday I ate a mushroom. I didn’t mean to, it just kind of happened. Slanky and I had grilled some leftovers from the weekend skewers (which had some mushrooms for the non-haters at the bbq) and there was a grilled one that looked just like the beef and I popped it off and ate it before I realized it wasn’t meat. It definitely didn’t taste like anything except the marinade and the texture was a little lighter than meat but overall it didn’t kill me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I can now eat mushrooms because when I actually put thought into the prospect it still makes my stomach turn. However, I didn’t vomit after realizing my mistake so perhaps there’s hope for me yet. At this rate I should be able to eat them with wild abandon by the time I am 80.