Irony

It is one of life's little jokes that just when I decide to write a blog about food and cooking my stomach goes on strike. I had a biopsy yesterday. Afterwards the nurse walked me to the car and told Mike, "She needs to rest. No housework for the rest of the day."

Not being allowed to do housework is fundamentally different from sneaking off with your laptop and avoiding doing it. I was not allowed to clean up after dinner. Nor was I allowed to start laundry even though the new house cleaner played mix and match with the clean and dirty clothes and now all garments are under suspicion and must be made pure.

I sat in bed and watched an episode of This American Life (the TV version) on my laptop and didn't feel I should be doing something else.

This morning at 7am the nurse called to check up on me. She asked if it hurt when I talked. I said, "Not casual conversation, but last night I had to stop reading to the kids."

She said, "I told you to rest!"

Oh, woe! I missed out on a day when even reading to the kids was more than I was supposed to do. Not that I don't enjoy reading to the kids. But Ev and Clem jostle for space and Greta climbs all over me saying, "You are my gymastics mat!"

In truth reading to the kids is sometimes an aerobic workout.

I am still failing to challenge the kids' palates with our cooking. However, Greta was adamant that she would not eat french toast for breakfast, and she did eat it after making it. Oh culinary victory. I think. It reminds me of a time when I was at a birthday party and a mom admonished her four year old to eat all her cake. Ok, it was whole wheat french toast and had milk and omega-3 enriched eggs and it was served with cinnamon sugar. Cinnamon sugar, you remember, one of the 11 Best Foods You Aren't Eating (ok, maybe not the sugar part).

Smooth

Greta's favorite smoothie pops.

2 containers TJs strawberry yogurt
2 bananas
orange juice
fresh or frozen berries (optional)

Drink some, freeze some.

Pumpkin Seeds

Today our only home cooking was toasted pumpkin seeds. Unless you count soft boiled eggs.

Clem carved her first pumpkin. She left the slimy pumpkin entrails on the sidewalk for our blind neighbor. Fortunately Marian was out with her aide.

We did Latin over pumpkin seeds and cinnamon toast.

I put ingredients in the bread machine. It seems I would rather write than cook with the kids. This entry will not cohere. It will not form a nice bolus and slide down your throat. It is rather unpalatable. Food metaphors about writing are all I can cook up tonight. The forecast for tomorrow is not good either.

Molecular Gastronomy

Sara Dickerman writes in Slate about trying out Molecular Gastronomy on her son whom she dubs The Critic. I am fairly certain Clem would eat tomato spheres and carrot airs.

The deer was in my front yard the other day. We are not planning on making deer spheres, even if he and his kin ate our pumpkins.

Crayfish Legs

I had crayfish on Bastille Day at Chez Panisse. They were garlicky little guys but nothing special. Not a match for the $100 Au Bon Climat pinot noir we accidentally ordered. Epicurious has several recipes for crawfish. There's crawfish etouffee and fried crawfish remoulade.

Crayfish legs, being quite small, are not considered much of a delicacy. For people.

But just imagine the temptation of soft-shelled crawfish legs. To another crawfish.

Clem returned home today to find that Evelyn's crayfish, Neon, had eaten all the claws and legs off her vulnerable little Coral just after he shed his shell. He was lying on his side, a multiple amputee, twitching one eye.

Clem sobbed and sobbed, "He was just a baby."

Food and death are all bound up.

My sister Kelly and I, at 7 and 5, were put off veal for years when, as we were happily licking our mint chip ice cream and looking at the cows in the dairy barn, a farmer dragged a calf into the barn by its legs and said he was going to kill it for veal.

A couple weeks ago Ev and a friend and I went to the East Bay Vivarium to look at the lizards and snakes. It was feeding time.

There were fuzzy yellow chicks quivering in some cages. In another was a freshly killed guinea pig. While I was watching the snake maneuver the guinea pig to its mouth an employee brought out a bunny and dumped it unceremoniously on a small table near the cage as if it were a sack of potatoes. But it was a bag of potatoes with legs and it tried to escape and fell off the table. The guy grabbed it roughly and threw it in the snake cage.

I didn't want to watch, but the kids stayed for the squeeze. After ten minutes or so I passed by and caught a glimpse of legs flailing. I admit to gasping in surprise.

"Oh, it'll do that for 15 minutes," the employee said.

When we left I was shocked at how I enjoyed the sunshine and the breeze, the people laughing. I felt I'd been liberated from a dungeon, though I hadn't felt that way inside. When I see or hear about employees dragging calves by their chained legs or slamming down bunnies or breaking chicken wings when shoving them into crates I think they must hate what they are doing and this is the way they have found to cope with it.

I've read stories about Native American or African hunters who thank the animal for its gift. I am thinking about the sacred and the profane. Or some such dichotomy. I don't think I've got hold of quite the right one, but I'll go with it anyway. Killing pushes us (some of us, those of us who didn't grow up on farms, say) one way or the other. Is killing a sacred act or a profane one? If I had to kill something would I feel forced to profane indifference and even cruelty? If I could keep myself from feeling silly would I be kinder and gentler and happier if I thanked the animal for its "gift".

My friend Stefani is slaughtering her own chickens. It is not yet an everyday thing. The last rooster she killed took forever to die. You can see a picture and read her blog here on it here (scroll down to Oct. 1).

I am never going to be a vegetarian and have always kept myself protectively distant from slaughterhouses and books like Fast Food Nation.

And I've always felt sorry for animals that had to eat their meat raw. Poor things that can't cook. But my recent forays into raw meat have proved that the raw flesh of fish, scallops, cows and goats is quite palatable.

Hey, Neon, next time, save a little leg for me.