Tiny Grass

See here for an article on a Swiss chef serving soups and stews with breast milk in London.

He said: “I first experimented with breast milk when my daughter was born.

Now, can you imagine how annoying it would be if you were a new mother and you had this man/chef as your husband?  Here is how I imagine it might go down:

Mom:  Can you get me some water, dear, while I nurse the baby?

Chef/Father: But of course.  But would you mind pumping from the other breast?  I need more milk for tonight’s chicken pot pie.

Mom: Ummmm….I’m a little sore right now, dear.

Chef/Father: I just need 8 ounces, hunny.  I’m sure you have enough!

OR

Mom: (Nursing baby on couch)

Chef/Father: Dear, I must talk with you about something important!

Mom: What is it?  Are we running out of diapers?

Chef/Father: No.  It’s your diet, dear.  You really need to refrain from eating garlic for the next few days.  If garlic gets into your milk, it will positively ruin my Creme Broulee!

Guanábanas in Colombian Market

Originally uploaded by philipbouchard

Today Tica Macha mentioned making up a song to remember how to pronounce guanabana, a fruit that makes the most refreshing juice ever. I’d like to know how Tica Macha’s song goes because we used a song to help us remember too, except we didn’t come up with it ourselves. Guanabana is pronounced is just like the old Muppet song Mahna Mahna. Frankly, I can’t even think of the fruit anymore without singing the Muppet song. Or going to Doo te do doo after hearing or reading the word Guanabana.

Arp and I have loved mojitos ever since we discovered them, quite a few years back. When we lived in Manhattan, we’d have to scour the local markets to find some decent mint. It was sometimes hard to find, which was irritating when we had the urge for a Mojito.

Since we’ve lived in our current house in the exurbs, I’ve invested some effort in growing our own mint. My favorite variety for mojitos is chocolate mint. The first year, I listened to all the warnings about mint taking over the garden, and I contained the mint plants in huge buried buckets. Well, we drink a lot of mojitos in the summer, and we quickly exhausted the supply of my bucket-bound mint. The next year I threw caution to the wind, dug up the buckets, and let my mint taste the full freedom of my herb garden. Holy mojitos! We were in heaven!

But something has happened this year that is totally unexpected. Arp and I both admitted to each other the other day that we are a tiny bit bored of drinking mojitos. We still wanted the mint, but we needed it to be something a little different, more exciting.  The garden is overflowing with mint, of course.

Now, the great thing about Mojitos is that they don’t have any fancy ingredients. Rum, seltzer, sugar, lime, mint. How easy is that? We get a big ole jug of rum and we are set as long as the mint in the garden lives and we remember to buy the limes occasionally at the supemarket. When we whipped out all our drink-making books the other night, all the recipes seemed to include odd-sounding liquors that we most certainly didn’t have. (Before we had kids, our liquor cabinet was stocked with quite a few interesting concoctions, but our supply has dwindled. We are now at rum and tequila.)

Tell me, dear readers - what exciting drinks can I make with mint?

I did something really stupid last night. I attempted to shuck oysters for the first time. Why did I think I could do it? In fact, I didn’t even look up any directions or helpful hinters on how it is done. I was just operating on the assumption that it couldn’t be that hard. After all, I’ve seen it done hundreds of times when Arp and I are sitting at various oyster bars. I also conveniently forgot about the fact that the shuckers at Legal Seafood, for instance, seem to always be wearing gloves. Do you see where all this is going?

So I have an appointment to see the doctor at 11. Hopefully I won’t die of Vibrio infection before that. I have a large puncture wound on my palm. As I was applying pressure to the wound last night, I told Arp that I would rather go through 5 episodes of natural childbirth than recover and deal with this wound.

M asks: How bout ten births?

Me: OK. Ten.

M: 11?

Me: No problem.

M: How bout one hundred! (I think that’s the largest number he knows).

Me: Sure. One Hundred births! I think that might be my limit, though.

After the injury occurred last night, I did some searching on the internet. Seems that oyster shucking actually requires quite a bit of skill, and that even experienced shuckers frequently end up with puncture wounds. That makes the prices I typically pay at oyster bars sound positively cheap. What was I thinking when I bought a dozen of those innocent looking mollusks yesterday?! No more shucking for me. I really hope my hand doesn’t require stitches.

It is out with the old and in with the new here. Out (hopefully) with the beets that are still sitting in my fridge from winter. I generally hate beets, although we got a ton of them from our CSA this winter. I’m always trying to figure out what to do with them. Arp will eat them, but I can only serve him so many meals of roasted beets in one week, and that doesn’t really get rid of all the beets we have to go through in order to use what our CSA gives us. So I’ve been on a quest to find recipes where beets are tolerable. Here’s one of them:

It is a recipe for beet pancakes that I developed from the recipe in Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious. I had to mess with the recipe quite a bit in order to get in some whole grain flour, and also to avoid using a boxed pancake mix, which I never buy. Read more »