introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- cooking for one a new moon - 18 february 2o15 "my baby is happy / no wonder I'm happy / while I'm cooking breakfast / for the one I love."~fanny brice the weekend came just in time. i hung up from that last call and made my way out the door in the freezing cold. the glass doors shut behind me with a gasp of heat from inside escaping with me into the night; two empty unplanned days yawned before me. i sighed, tired and looking forward to a quiet weekend as i headed for the car and my commute north to bring home my baby. there was a blizzard in the forecast and i was looking forward to being snowed in with no excuse to venture out much. i've needed a weekend at home after my last weekend was spent unexpectedly in boston. i spent saturday getting my kitchen cleaned up a little bit with designs on making a fancy valentine's day dinner for one. the snow started coming down a little early so we bundled up and headed out for a few errands. the baby is getting good at running errands with me...or maybe i'm getting better at managing them in such a way that our trips are usually unscathed by inconsolable meltdowns. i'm racking up efficiency points. carrying him through stores in the wrap makes the whole thing more manageable. i don't understand this business of lugging a giant kid-carrier around everywhere. that's impossible and unsustainable as he gets bigger, right? the thing is, while wearing him in the wrap makes everything easier in general, it means we have a different challenge. the visibility of the baby means that we then have to dodge all the baby-queer people who want to stop and ask a million questions about him. somehow, i didn't know such people existed...or if i did in some collective consciousness way, i'm used to being generally unapproachable for the headphones in my ears. i only recently stopped shopping with music in my head because i've been enjoying talking about grocery shopping with the baby. come on, i enjoy talking about grocery shopping with pretty much anyone and this poor guy is a captive audience. but, no headphones combined with the ultra-cute of him wrapped up and head poking out of my vest tends to draw these people like crazy. they're the only hinderance to my lightning fast grocery shopping velocity. instead of running through my list, i'm answering questions about how old he is, if he's sleeping through the night, agreeing that he's attentive and curious and adorable. yes. yes. yes. eggs. kale. almost three months. cheese. mushrooms. onions. all night, yes. beer. yes. thank you. i dodged my way through the saturday target crowd, buying enough soup for a month so i don't have to go back again for awhile...yogurt, dog food, out the door. i haven't been real grocery shopping in awhile and even though the roads were getting bad, i was looking forward to hitting hannaford's with my dinner plan in mind. i was positively aching to cook. the grocery store is a pretty rad place for the kiddo. the fresh vegetables and fruit and the dramatic track lighting to make those items appear even more sexy than they might ordinarily prove fascinating fare and i love watching him take everything in. i occasionally point and name items for him as i fill the basket. somehow, he makes talking to myself seem more normal. my list wasn't too long. the best food never requires too many ingredients, i suppose...but i was trying something completely new and was enjoying taking my time being a little selective. the baby fell asleep before i had all the vegetables i wanted. he barely noticed when i bent to reach the kalamata olives on the olive bar. he snoozed through the wine aisle and fussed only for a moment when i stopped too long to look at different kinds of rice. when we got home, i felt pretty run down. the sun was gone early as it always is here in winter. it was getting to be too late for me to cook and enjoy any part of it so i just decided i'd make my nice dinner on sunday when we were really snowed in. i put the groceries away and finished cleaning the kitchen in between diaper changes and feeding the baby who alternately sleeps and eats when the sun sets. when he was finally asleep for the night, i stood in my finally-clean kitchen with a beer, happy. i stood in the doorway and checked on the baby quietly, telling myself i should get to bed. it was late and i was tired but i was restless. my phone made a noise. "wait are you up and cooking at 3am?" i don't think he understood that i was just tying up the meat and chopping vegetables...prepping, really. i haven't cooked anything this nice since that lamb dinner last summer. this time, i'd gotten out the lamb shanks cut like osso buco from my chest freezer. i tied the pieces of lamb and got them ready for sunday. i thinly sliced onions and shallots, chopped celery and carrots, pitted and sliced the kalamatas, and minced garlic. i've found that i can entertain my kid and cook real food if i make it like a cooking show and tell him exactly what i'm doing. having the vegetables already chopped would make putting everything together a lot easier on sunday afternoon for sure. "...I just wanted to do it when I could enjoy it." I haven't stopped to chop vegetables like that in so long. i tear up kale and slice mushrooms and a hunk of onion at breakfast time most days but i haven't spent time enjoying chopping vegetables since i lived in pittsburgh, maybe. could it possibly have been that long ago? i suppose it probably was. i've got no real knife skills, i've never taken a class--though i've always wanted to. there are just things that i love doing like making bread and cutting vegetables that are meditation in themselves if i can take the time to enjoy what i'm doing. so yes. at 3am, i was chopping vegetables and putting them into glass containers to use the next day. the house was quiet, the fire was warm. the dog was snoring at the top of the stairs. i had music on softly. the only sound that hovered above all the other house-noise was of my knife slicing through vegetables and hitting the cutting board over and over and over. in that hour or so i spent in my sparkling kitchen in the dark hours of the night, i felt like myself. as long as i can find the time--even at 3am--to nurture myself, i'm going to keep being okay. it took about three months to figure out how and when to fit it in but i'm making it happen. in the end, i came out with a beautiful lemon risotto, lamb osso buco with tomatoes, kalamata olives, and gremolata...green beans, nice bread, and some shitty wine. valentine's dinner for one with leftovers for lunch. good job, me. chopping vegetables. grocery shopping. that's how i spent valentine's day this year. not too exciting but hey, not too shabby, either. xo, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
||||||
|
||||||