too-may-toe toh-mah-toh

i'm not sure why, but courgette just sounds way sexier than zucchini . . . either way i picked up a handful of little green squash with the intention of actually doing more than fancy sandwiches for dinner this week.

don't get me wrong, the fancy sandwiches were delish! owen has become his own sandwich master which means rather than suspiciously look at what's on his plate he relishes over his avocado-turkey-creamcheese-blackberryjelly creation and says: "mom, do you know why this sandwich is sooooo good? because I made it!" meanwhile my favorite this week has to be the toasted flax seed cibatta (leftover in the freezer from lasagna dinner last week) with some goat's milk creamy cheese (discovered this at ivonne's and it's on my permanent tjoe's list: it's AmAzing and lighter that chevre and tangier and tastier than spreadable cream cheese), sliced heirloom tomato and fresh thyme (my basil was looking pathetic and the thyme was a great compliment to the cheese) with a little flake sea salt (god bless michael for packing this in his suitcase from sweden!). the great thing about sammies all week is that not only do we get creative with fresh ingredients but it's teaching me how to live with a sparser (is that a word??) refrigerator.

but the courgettes-- en route back to cali i picked up a bbc cooking magazine olive which was not only loaded with fresh and inspired seasonal recipes for those british green squash but had some cheeky foodie articles as well (like a "you think your xyz is better than gordon ramsay's" featuring a lasagna-off and a debate over picnics). i tabbed some potentially tasty finds including this cous cous (hopefully i'll be comparing results with a fellow foodie this week!) and this pita pizza. owen is a big fan of cous cous and i thought we could make our own individual crispy pizzas. there is also a go-to jar of pesto in the fridge so i can re-create the inspired wednesday pizzas we had with bw&s with some sauteed squash, feta and kalamata olives. finally, i hope to continue to ravenously devour as many august tomatoes as i possibly can before the hothouse mealy shouldn't-be-allowed-to-call-them-tomatoes fruits appear in the fall--but by then there's squash. . .

tonight, though, i confess to picking up polish dogs at costco. sometimes you just gotta give in. . .

the body is the poem

i'm a late convert to walt -- reading carson's short stories got me interested in his "songs" and i've had this posted above my desk (thanks to another poetic inspiration)--and enjoyed andreas' post of his "facing west from california's shores" and it seemed that poetry is meant to be cut and pasted and shared and constantly re-birthed.

so here's my scrap:

this is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful undeducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all that you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul and your very flesh shall be a great poem. . .

end of the week food love

it's been a lovely, lovely week with michael home and it concluded with cafeneio on friday--of course i have neither pictures nor recipes, but i will share this straight-out-of-a-dutch-stilllife plate of home grown figs and grapes we took home. they are as delicious as they are beautiful. owen was smitten with the grapes--so little and sooo sweet! again, the simple and surprising pleasures of in season, fresh grown food. . . michael made his signature lime drops which hadn't been shaken since our DINK days and the fresh lime juice and zesty ginger was a perfect late summer treat. . .

last night owen and i made lasagna together for michael (alas, 3 more weeks until our next family dinner) and i experimented with sweet italian chicken sausage for a lighter version of my more traditional meat sauce (half the saturated fat as pork!) and tried the par-boil trick the trader joe's sample guy suggested--the meat was not missed! the lasagna was hearty and intensely flavorful but didn't leave you with just-ate-too-much-pasta bloat. just the smell of the onions and parsley simmering and the simple pleasure of layering the fresh mozerella and spooning spinach-rich ricotta was worth the experience. owen, of course, was all about cheese and was feeling extra "big" grating a 2lb block of parmigano reggiano. (he "doesn't love" tomato sauce and "will maybe like it when he's five"). owen in action:

here's the final dish (just a phone snapshot--the camera's on holiday) served with proscuitto-wrapped cantaloupe and arugula and shave parmiganno with our prized figs. we will definitely be experimenting with lasagna again--perhaps some late summer veggies next time. . .

D O G (and the boy who loves him)

welcome dc-24!

let me preface this by saying my stairs hadn't been vacuumed in months. and for the amount of traffic our 8x8 foot family room gets the carpet is well, worn. and no matter how often i changed the bag our hoover windtunnel with its duct-taped power cord despite picking up popcorn kernels and mightymachine dirt actually made the room feel less clean. . .

i even took it to a vacuum repair shop and the vacuum salesman scoffed and offered me a $200 trade in for a $900 miele (and not the pretty one in the back of hte w-s catalouge either) or $90 to clean it and make it usable. i rolled my hoover back out of the sew & vac and spent an hour carefully disassembling and cleaning that red hoover. i felt damn handy and i had used power tools. but the vacuum still sucked. (hmmm. hadn't meant to be punny.)

. . . anyhow, i'd been dreaming of a dyson for some time and was determined to hold out for a vacuum cleaner that was as beautiful as it was functional. three best buy gift cards (the "perks" of michael living at a best western for 3 weeks at a time) and one visa check card (the last of the radisson points) later and we are pleased to announce the newest member of our family:

the dc--24

you can check out the reviews for yourself--amazon, target, best buy. . . it's a

love or hate kind of deal. we got the "ultra lightweight" dyson and. . . i'll let the pictures do the talking. ok let me just say that after vacuuming the living room (twice already this week), our bedroom and the hallway owen exclaimed: "ok mommy now i'll go pick up my room so we can vacuum it next!". oh, and unlike the airblade (which is soo worth a trip to the san clemente beach bathroom despite it's jet engine sonics) it is gloriously quiet--a key bonus if you refuse to use restrooms that have automatic flushers because they are too loud (fixed, by the way with a bandaid--but that's another story). now the pictures:

here owen's actually dancing with a mop. that's right--vacuuming is so fun that all cleaning is exciting! and below he's wiping down our blinds.

tomorrow: the stairs.

"movin' to the country" ... gonna eat a lot of tomatoes (and oranges and carrots)

on sunday we went to south coast farms and picked up our produce for the week-

-i planned our menu to highlight the best of late summer: tomatoes!! as i confessed earlier, i could easily live on caprese sandwiches but since michael's home this week i thought it would be fun to plan a menu and try some new recipes. my goal is still to eat seasonally and simply so i turned again to the"summer" section in my everyday food.

here's an update of some delish finds so far:

on sunday we grilled the "favorite turkey burger" which incorpriates gruyere cheese and mustard in the patty for extra flavor and were surprised at how tasty they were! we topped with thickly sliced beefsteak tomatoes and avocado. we'll definitley incorporate this into our regular rotation. . .

yesterday we made the flank steak with lime marinade and i had planned to make the mellon & boccocini salad but after a mozerella shortage at tj's (not that there was any melon left anyway--we had devoured the sweet stuff with our burgers) i thawed some bread crusts left from our simple's wheat seed loaf and made tomato & grilled bread salad instead. the steak was tender and zesty and the salad highlighted the heirloom yellow, green, and rich red tomatoes. yum again! i saved half of the steak and tonight it'll star in vietnamese steak sandwiches at our disney picnic (going to get bread at cali adventure and watch the electric parade tonight!!). . .

oh, and we've been eating those peaches too. . .

know your dinosaurs: take the quiz!

i've just been googling for some good dinosaur crafts to do--and i realized that not only has owen's comprehension surpassed dinosaur sock puppets (which are regular button-eyed sock guys with mohawks) and dinosaur oragami (which does look cool--but not quite a pachycephalasaurus) but that i've become quite dinosaur saavy myself. all i remember from grade school was that boys liked trexes and i was partial to the not-spiny brontosaurus (who i think is now a generic term for the saurapods liek brachi- and apata- . . .). but i've found myself intrigued both the scientific mystery of it all and the nomenclature. so looking around i even had a go at a dinosaur quiz (which i can proudly say i scored a perfect ten). anyhow, i think we'll just make our own dinosaur book using watercolors, markers and construction paper.
so the question is will this be a book about the jurrasic or the cretaceous. . .

another recent development in the dinosaur obsession has been taking pictures of his dinosaurs (hmmm wonder where the obsessive archiving comes from??)--owen poses them (like getting pteranodon to sit on top of brachiasaurus' head which is actually pretty impressive) and plays with angle and perspective (let's get just red trex's head or stand back and get all of dinosaur land). i personally think he needs his own lacma exhibit (kind of like the edouard sautai exhibit we saw at gallerie des enfants at the pompidou). his best work is still the snaps from dino mountain posted below but here are a few more he took with my phone at home:

know your vegetables

when we went to to the farmer's market last week between the heirloom tomatoes and the apricots i was just mooning over color and texture and didn't have much of a gameplan other than letting owen pick some vegetables. he always picks broccoli, which is good--but one can only eat so much broccoli. so we picked swiss chard, or at least i thought it was swiss chard. and of course he picked the purple one which of course i would have done too. we really swooned over this swiss chard. in fact we even had a photo shoot with the leaves (yup owen's wearing a toolbelt--he was quite proud of putting that on himself):

the thing is, i don't know much about greens. i'm a big fan of spinach in my omelettes and i buy that big bag of happy greens from trader joe's to add to my minestrone for a chock-full-of-goodness finish but that's about it. we had finished the broccoli and discovered eating carrots "bugs bunny style" (although that reference means nothing to owen) was much tastier than little chewing on little twigs. . . so the chard had been sitting in the crisper and in a panic i grabbed it without much thought and while cooking up the tricolor pasta owen had chosen (again, pretty purple and green pasta) tossed it in my iron skillet with some olive oil, squeezed a lemon (in retrospect, my big mistake perhaps?)and at the end threw in some pasta water to let it simmer a bit. . .

now i had bought some real slabs of bacon from the marbella butcher thinking i'd do a proper greens (you know, i'd heard about that kind of thing in southern folklore) but i had this avocado and tomato so i had to make a BLAT sandwich with it instead. anyway, it was bitter and soggy and just all around icky--and i tossed it all in the sink. i wondered if i had leached some kind of poison--you know, like you'd get if you ate tomato vines or raw rhubarb. and then i wondered if i had bought swiss chard at all. so this morning i looked it up chard on wiki and it looks like we bought red chard, kind of. anyhow, all this to say--know your vegetables. or at least consult your joy of cooking or bitman or martha. . . .

no, i think what i want to say is that some days we take burgundy tomatoes and slice them with buffalo mozerella then drizzle them with blood orange olive oil and top it all off with some purple basil then sandwich it with some toasty crusty wheatseed bread and of course it's delish. it's predictably simple and satisfying. and nobby, dirty carrots with long green stems you snap off are tasty just scrubbed right out of the sink. but there are greens that look perfectly like purple trees and lemon persian cucumbers that have been just waiting their turn behind broccoli. . .

morning blessing:

we awoke to find with this gorgeous yellow swallowtail waiting outside our window who stayed with us until morning coffee. . .

we saw "REAL dinosaurs"

. . . on dino mountain at the Wild Animal Park this afternoon! Owen, our budding young paleontologist, was both overwhelmed and enthralled by the life sized TRex:

The best part though was stamping the dinosaur "passport" and distinguishingREAL dinosaur roars. We had just started the Chased by Dinosaurs BBC series and watched Nigel fly a byplane alongside a Quetzalcoatlus so we were stoked to see the bat-like giant at the bottom of the mountain. The exhibit is short, a dozen or so dinosaurs, but we were excited to see the well known players--a stegosaurus you could move with a joystick and of course a life sized TREX "he really IS as big as our house--as well as some new favorites: the spiky egg-headed pachycephalosaurus (who had a 9 inch skull!) and the maternal edmontosaurus who dug a nest in the mud for her babies to hatch.


of course not only did we get to see dinosaurs but we got to see jennifer and baby lily for the second time this month!! owen loved teaching lily about dinosaur roars and showing her the proper way to play dinosaur mountain in the discovery station which was filled everything from a fossil dig sandbox to a dinosaur puppet stage.























here are owen's snapshots from the discovery center: this first one i found out is a spinosaurus on a plus sign because
TRex + Stegosaurus= Spinosaurus. Of course!


Owen spent some time talking to the resident safari guide, not an "expert" palentologist she averred, about the differences between herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores. here's the herbivore brachiosaurus carrying the omnivore quetz... you know.

and finally the recycle sign on the trash can-- because that's really important, mommy. . .

cafeneio

what is cafeneio you might ask? when you are traveling and you're starving at a bar or cafe you had better order food--although you never know what you'll get and somehow you won't end up with the tab--with your wine, or coffee, or grappa. simply, it's the wonderful ritual of eating and drinking and eating some more and then drinking some more. ivonne, whom owen has dubbed the queen of "fancy food," made a gorgeous variety of hummus and spreads--from a roasted pepper with. . .

oh, wait i can't tell you. ivonne is notoriously secretive when it comes to recipes. really. don't ask her for a recipe. i think it's an ecuadorian sin. what i've learned is that i have to arrive early for dinner and carefully watch what she sneaks out of her magical cupboards. but then her ingredients include oregano kostas snuck in his suitcase in a ziplock bag in greece or fava beans harvested from their garden that only grow in their precise latitute and taste sweeter because ivon is a poetess.

but back to the cafeneio. i think it's because owen carries a golden ticket in his side pocket, but we were lucky enough to join this wonderfully nourishing ritual and you can see that owen definitely enjoyed dipping and tasting and drinking. he had his own box of lemonade and the rest of us decided we might as well celebrate. i'm not sure if you can see but we decided to pull out the grappa. and since we had just been talking about the film bottleshock and the 1976 "judgement of paris" we thought it would be fun to choose our pour based on a blind tasting. we had a peruvian bottle that andreas had brought home from his fearless travels (follow them here), an ecuadorian bottle (a great grandchild of a german scientist whose hobby brought the only grapes to the region), a greek bottle harvested in a 200 year old distillery (ok, this was a blind tasting and while i was trying to take notes i was doing a blind tasting).

i think at one point ivonne and i had figured out which pour belonged to which bottle but by then we'd been warned to drink water and then opened a bottle of rabbit ridge rhone style wine which was amazing (and i was tipped off that gerard's in redlands is carring this as a buy a 2nd bottle for pennies deal) all the while dipping in secret spreads and indulging in home grown tomatoes and feta with that secret oregano. . .

dinsoaurs and oranges

this morning after staying up until 3 rather obsessively working on our sweden shutterfly book (only 3 more days until the 25% off freeship coupon expires!) i reallllly almost stayed on the couch instead of heading out to the irvine farmer's market as planned. it helped that i had recruited an eager donna for our saturday adventure and after already postponing our 9:30 pick up time to 10:30 i figured it would just be really lame to cancel again. but mostly it seemed important just to go, even if only we caught the vendors packing up and got a taste of blenheim apricots and valencia orages it would be a strong green light towards our commitment to living more healthy and conscious. . .

anyway, it was sooooo worth it! we arrived and were amazed by the bustle of friendly and conscious food growers and the free samples of everything from sweet yellow watermellon (delish actually--like a cross between a canaloupe and a red melon) to soleadad goats cheese. owen went right for the champagne grapes (yup he's already got that palate!) and the dinosaur plums. of course owen wanted to know WHY these plums were called dinosaur after closer inspection and when the vendor explained the skin is mottled just like a dinosaur's a fellow pluot enthusiast smiled and chimed in "hey, i never knew that!". then we bought half of a 2 for $5 persian canaloupe with another mom shopping with her tots and by this time were definitely sold on the market shopping.

owen took his camera so we had fun taking snaps of our favorite finds and posing for each other!

i had been interested in joining a CSA--or community supported agriculture-- co-op and spent a lot of time talking with paul at garden of eden organics who gave me the most beautiful heirloom tomato and an "enthusiastic buyer" discount on some gorgeous swiss chard. ok, i didn't know the technical term for CSA but wanted to sign up for that box of fresh, in season, local harvest goody bag of fruits, veggies and greens. paul showed me the week's box and it was really a beautiful assortment of everything from white nectarines to dragon greens. (i was a little unsure of making the north county trek to irvine every weekend and a couple of hours later out walking the dogs we chatted with a neighbor who belongs to the san juan CSA and so now we have a new challenge to check out south coast farms. ah, the work of it all!! hehe).

just when we were leaving we stopped to pick up a bag of valencia oranges for "orange master owen" to juice for his special pink smoothies and when we noticed the oranges were from riverside started chatting with vincent who has been growing his oranges in the grove less than a mile behind my parent's house! so of course we bought a bag and got a handful of fiji apples to take home for being from the 'hood!

all of this cheerful haggling made us hungry so of course we had to hit the UCI in & out (eric schlosser of course would approve!) before heading home to unload our stash. . .