Food

Standing Still-A Free-Write Response

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

Literary Mama had a free-writing prompt today asking, “Consider how you make space and time for stillness.  How do you slow down?” I decided to free write today, to answer that question for myself.

pizza

Home-made pizza is what makes me slow down. It is a ridiculously slow process for something I can get other people to bring to me, hot and ready, for a really nominal fee. I live in such a busy suburb of Chicago I can even get deep dish pizza delivered within the half hour. But scheduling in homemade pizza as a dinner is my way of saying to myself, “We are not bound by deadlines today, we are not going to try to make, eat and clean up from dinner in thirty minutes so we can rush off to do God knows what else that seems more important than just relaxing.” It takes time to knead the dough, to let it rise, to roll it out, to get everyone’s apron on and off, to let everyone put their own toppings on, to take pictures of the pizzas before they cook (always) to clean up the four cookie sheets and one glass bowl we need to use, to wipe down the flour-covered counter and floor and to let the piping hot pizzas cool off enough to eat. We eat on a blanket in front of the TV. It is a signal. We do not need to rush every moment of our lives. We have a luxury of time we either don’t admit we have over fears of looking too privileged, or don’t use because we fear we’ll be the only ones. This is a signal that the world doesn’t need to swirl around us, that pausing and taking unnecessary time together is necessary.

Becoming a Hobbit This Summer

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t posted much for June, and I apologize. Things have shifted and changed around here with the seasons.

Our peonies came and went, huge fluffy pom poms of pink that were delicately soft for being so big.

I swore like a sailor when I found standardized testing “practice” workbooks in the usual end of the year backpack debris field. They were brand new, and I suspect the school wants us to use them. I growled, “I taught, if I believe that you sitting down to do these workbooks is more educational than the other things we plan to do this summer, we will do them. If I don’t, we won’t.” And so far we haven’t.

The boys and I have been very busy sitting in the grass, plucking little maple seedlings out of the lawn to see if the helicopter seeds are still attached.

maple

There are thousands of them, confirming my belief that if we all abandoned our houses, this whole neighborhood would be a forest in just a few short years.

We planted a garden and rabbits managed to eat our parsley. However the basil, cucumbers, and a variety of heirloom tomato the boys picked out only for its name “Mr. Stripey” are doing just fine. Oh, and so are the yellow tomatoes we planted named, like a character out of West Side Story, “Lemon Boy”.

Other changes have happened with my health, negative at first, then positive. Near Memorial Day I realized that while I always feel tired, I was falling asleep more and more often right after eating. It would be a swoon, almost a faint, where my body felt like lead and I couldn’t hold myself upright a second longer. It looked more and more like reactive hypoglycemia, a problem my doctor had casually mentioned years ago in passing, and one that fit my patterns of fatigue and anxiety almost exactly. In this condition, if you eat too many sugars or carbs at one sitting without enough protein or fiber, your blood sugar spikes dramatically and too much insulin is sent in to deal with it. Consequently, your blood sugar then drops too low causing jitters, anxiety, extreme fatigue and sometimes a confusion that seemed suspiciously like when I would experience “fibro fog”. I’ve done crazier things for my health, so I didn’t hesitate long to try a hypoglycemic diet designed to keep your blood sugar stable throughout the day. You eat every two to three hours with low carb, high protein, high fruit and vegetable but small meals. No sweets, no caffeine, no alcohol.

paleo casserole

I feel a lot better. When eating perfectly balanced meals seven times a day is less of a hassle than the symptoms you were dealing with before, you know you may have really been sick. When spending a day of the week making a paleo egg breakfast casserole and roasting chicken and assembling salads and taking a short break to snack on hummus and carrots actually seems like it is a bargain for all the energy you’ve gotten back, maybe you really did have a blood sugar problem.

With this change, something else has happened since the seasons have changed that I never thought would. I have been able to take the boys to the pool, and parks, and to tennis courts, and for hikes around our ponds without the fear that it would be too much. That I would get so scared for them that I would limit what they were allowed to do. That I would become an emotional wreck and start yelling at them unnecessarily in public. That I would feel so sick that I would throw up, or need to collapse, or need to rush home. We’ve spent years, and years, doing not a lot because I just couldn’t.

While I tried to focus on all that I could do, that we could do, it wasn’t nearly as much as other families could. If we went to the zoo with you, or a splash park or a playground and I seemed breezy and happy-go-lucky and fine, some part of that was always a benign lie. Getting through that outing was usually a day or so of planning to make sure it went smoothly and weighing whether the time and energy it would require was worth it. The day after was spent in recuperation, getting either my anxiety back in check or my body, all the while having to tell the boys “no” over and over until I felt well enough to handle the process again. If we did make it, know that I had weighed that it was worth it, that the pain I might have gone through to have that experience was one I said “yes” to, and I absolutely meant it. That part was sincere, if it looked like it was a light and casual thing, that part was not.

Suddenly I have the summer as a stay-at-home mom I had always wanted to have with my boys.

willow

I haven’t had to tell them “no” nearly as often. I have been able to say “yes” with just a moment’s notice, or “yes” to multiple outing in the same day. They are going to become spoiled rotten soon. I still have fibromyalgia, and still have unexplained pain. One evening I did have to tell them that I thought the water at the pool would be too cold for me, and that my muscles might cramp. They did, making it very painful to walk back to the car. But, the overwhelming fatigue is mostly gone and in a pain and fatigue disease, that is literally half the battle.

So, I haven’t written in a while because I have been finally busy just enjoying summer. And because I have suddenly become a hobbit, preparing and eating breakfast and second breakfast and elevensies and luncheon and afternoon tea and dinner and supper. I do find myself walking barefoot through the long soft summer grass more than ever before, and I have always been fairly short.

Poultry

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

poultry

My youngest child has always had a fondness for birds, though as I try to trace it back I can’t quite describe when it began.

When I was pregnant with his older brother, I dreamt that my little baby was a songbird. I don’t know that I ever shared that story with the boys.

His older brother’s favorite stuffed animal since birth was a large penguin named Narnie.

I sing the song “Little Bird” from The Man of La Mancha every night as I tuck them in. It begins, “Little bird, little bird, in the cinnamon tree…little bird, little bird, please take pity on me…”

When my youngest turned four I began calling him my duckling. His soft light hair reminded me so much of a baby bird’s pin feathers.

We have a bird feeder, though quite often we forget to fill it. Near our house we have seen red-winged blackbirds and Canadian geese, robins and cardinals, finches and seagulls, herons and red-tailed hawks.

My youngest has a collection, now, of stuffed animals that are birds. There are a mama and baby owl set named Snowy and Syrup. There are huge ducklings, smallish penguins, a chick and even a wild turkey. The birds nearly always keep the coveted stuffed animal spot on the bed, and rarely see the inside of the toy chest.

I suppose it was just a natural progression of his fondness that two weeks before Thanksgiving he suddenly found it unbearable to think of chickens and turkeys being eaten. I admit that all the billboards and television cooking shows made his sadness thicker. Everywhere there were raw birds, golden birds, chefs advising ways to tuck back wings and tie up legs. The carcass of a bird was identifiable as the body of something missing a head and stripped nude. He cried, quite often.

For those two weeks, and a few weeks after, he would not touch chicken or turkey, though both had made up half of his dinners before. We shielded him from seeing our Thanksgiving turkey as much as we could, and at the long dinner table that night he got to sit next to his uncle who is vegan, and revel in being with a like-minded soul.

In the midst of it all I wondered aloud with him if one thing that troubled him was the language we use. When we eat beef we don’t say were having “cow”. When we eat pork or bacon or ham we don’t automatically call it “pig”. I asked him if it would help him at least feel less sad if we called chicken and turkey “poultry”. He agreed that it would, that he would not have pictures in his head of a live chicken and a dead chicken at the same time.

As a whole family we’ve had more vegetarian meals lately, and also more beef and pork overall when we do eat meat. When we go to fast food restaurants I ask the boys if they want “Poultry Fingers” or hamburgers or mac and cheese. At home for dinner we still sometimes have “Poultry Vesuvio” or “Poultry Cacciatore” or “Barbeque Poultry Baked Potatoes.”

The word “poultry” seems to soften his stance on not eating “poultry” – since we started using that word he will sometimes choose the fingers or have a bit shredded in a soup. And while it buys me some time to get him acclimated to healthy vegetarian food and makes life a little easier from meal to meal, I feel dirty. I have marketed chicken differently, and so hidden the parts that are so objectionable to my five-year-old, and made it okay for him again. I am wondering how much longer I will hold out using the word “poultry” before I decide to say “chicken” or “turkey” again. When I switch back I have to be prepared that might be the end of my child eating meat and some radical changes are going to be happening around here.

He is developing empathy for other living creatures, and I cannot be mad at that.

The day before Thanksgiving he and his brother made posters about saving endangered species, protecting the food chain, discouraging hunters.

One says, at the top, “Do not hurt animals”.

Another of the posters asked, “Do you promise?”

I promise to try, my duckling.

I promise to remember that birds are your friends.

I promise to be respectful on that day when you finally do tell me you won’t be eating poultry ever again.

Losing My Food Mojo

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

Pumpkin Pie

My kitchen luck had run out last winter.

In rapid succession, over the course of seven to ten days, I…

  • Left a seventeen dollar pot roast sitting on the floor of our kitchen overnight. How, you may ask? It was still sitting in its Target bag, and pretty much any time we go grocery shopping one or two bags manage to escape being put away. The white and red bags filled with batteries or toothpaste live on the floor until I remember to take them upstairs where they belong, but I have never stepped over perishables before.
  • Destroyed another seventeen dollar hunk of meat. The second pot roast, left to cook in our crockpot, confirmed our fear that our crockpot only works on high. The meat languished on low for ten hours and was still nearly raw. I tried to save it on high and rendered it totally inedible.
  • Got such bad hand cramps before a party I couldn’t cut a strawberry. A strawberry!
  • Found honey on the couch and floor and absolutely no recollection of how it got there.
  • Made chicken and dumplings that were so salty we all courted high blood pressure.
  • Dropped a carton of eggs.
  • Cut my finger while taking the rind off ugli fruit.

And…

  • Ruined gnocchi. Gnocchi is a pasta dumpling that takes two to three minutes maximum to cook in boiling water. I have made pasta at least once a week for the last fifteen years. As a child, I was the official pasta tester for our family and made sure it wasn’t under or overcooked. If there was one thing in the world I was sure I couldn’t screw up, it was pasta. Instead of becoming dinner, the gnocchi all clumped together and bloated, like a pale, water-logged, dead fish. I pulled the mass out and had to bury it in the garbage can.

I was raised Catholic so the next step, once I admitted that perhaps I did have a cooking problem, was to figure out which saints might be able to help me out. I did some internet research and tried appealing to…

  • St. Anthony the Abbott – Patron Saint of Bacon
  • St. Drogo – Patron Saint of Coffee
  • St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Nicholas – Patron Saints of Baking
  • St. Luke, St. Augustine and St. Nicholas (again) – Patron Saints of Beer
  • St. Zita and St. Martha – Patron Saints of Housekeeping
  • St. Charles Borromeo – Patron Saint of Stomachaches
  • St. Michael the Archangel – Patron Saint of Grocers

And…

  • St. Lawrence – Patron Saint of Cooking

Eventually my bad luck ended, though I cannot say whether it was with or without divine intervention. I was reminded of this because Thanksgiving is coming up. Although these days I am pretty non-denominational, I am not above asking saints for a little help.

We’ll be feeding almost twenty people at our house in about a week. We’ll be working with our tiny kitchen, my dietary restrictions around dairy and corn syrup, the vegetarian options we make sure to have for my brother, the turkey that always fills the house with smoke but then turns out fine, the lovely wine my mother-in-law brings that I’ll dip into too early, the cranberry-walnut-bourbon Jello my mom brings that I’ll also dip into too early, and the fact that my youngest child now bursts into tears at the thought of eating birds. It seems like a good idea to do some preventative praying.

So…

Dear St. Lawrence,

I was hoping you could watch the pots and the oven a little, so I could feed my family and friends as well as I am able, and so I can take some time to appreciate what I’ve got. Please keep us free from burns and scalding and broken glasses. Please watch over the fridge to make sure nothing spoils, and the oven to make sure nothing burns. Please make sure the soy whipped cream is enjoyable, and that the real whipped cream doesn’t get trapped in its can, causing a small riot. I know you’re probably pretty busy, but thank you so much in advance.

Sincerely,

Kristin Wagner, in the Chicagoland area

Wasting Peels

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

orange peels

I had the boys try candied orange peels last Christmas.

There was a recipe I had wanted to try for years (actual, literal years). I had to track down raw hazelnuts, white pepper, candied lemon and orange peel and candied citron. The result, a tooth-breaking concoction, is a story for another day. In the end, I had quite a large amount of orange, lemon and citron to figure out what to do with, because I will most likely not be trying that again.

I really tried to sell those leftover candied orange peels. I explained how people knew how to make candied fruits before there were knights. How the process to make these is involved, taking days of boiling and boiling again and soaking everything in a thick sugar syrup. How this was a way to preserve sweets before electricity and refrigeration. How back in time nothing was wasted, not even peels. How it used to be when you yourself took the time to plant and harvest, raise and slaughter, grind and bake all your own food.

The boys took one ginger bite each. “This is what people used to have for candy?” My oldest is grimacing, but trying politely to hide it.

“Well, yeah…”

“You know, I feel really bad for people back then, that this is all they had.  Especially if it was so hard to make,” he concludes.

“Mommy?” My youngest is trying to hand his peel back to me. “Do I have to finish this?”

I say what I always say in these cases, “No, honey, you never have to finish dessert.”

It is clear it is going to be up to me alone to eat these; no one else will be helping me do so. I cannot just throw them away, especially after all the weight and importance I put on them.  I’ve started to feel bad for the Medieval children who would have treasured these, those poor souls my own child pities not because they had horribly short life expectancies or lived in disease-ridden poverty.  He pities them for their lack of M & M s and Reese’s Cups. I vow, solemnly, to enjoy them before buying any more treats for myself.

That vow was broken almost immediately, and shamefully, by a McDonald’s apple pie. It was purchased as one of two for a dollar. The other pie was thrown out when I realized eating both secretly in my car would have cost me 500 calories. I tried to give the second one to my youngest in the backseat. He had the good sense to tell me, “I don’t really want any. You know, you don’t ever have to finish dessert, Mommy.”

If any fourteenth century kids ever time-travel and witness this, I am certain that they would shake me by the shoulders, maybe even smack me around a bit, and throw a very sorry, pitying glance at my son for having to live in the world in which he does.

The Opposite of Fool-Proof

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

lemon knots

Some things you can only learn by feel.  Making lemon knot cookies is certainly one of those.

First of all, these Italian cookies are super temperamental. You are making a cookie dough which will have to become springy and stretchy almost as if you were making pizza.  The reason the gluten needs to develop is that this will get rolled into a snake shape, knotted, baked and glazed with lemon juice and powdered sugar. There are about a million points along the way where the whole process can go terribly wrong.

The weather can be bad.  If the air is too dry, if the humidity is very low or the heat has been on too much, the dough will break apart as soon as you try to roll it into a snake.  Add more liquid to make it stretch, and you could end up with a gluey mess instead of something malleable.  Overcorrect with more flour and you have crumbs that will never come together.

So, assume that you get a good, moderately humid day to bake.  The dough comes together just right, or so you thought.  You grab a ball of dough to fill the palm of your hand.  To get the right amount, you imagine you are trying to cup as many grains of rice as you can, fingers folded over your palm so none escape.  The dough should fill that space.  As you begin rolling out the snake you realize it is just a tiny bit too powdery and it will not stick at all to the kitchen table but scoots back and forth like an air-hockey puck, refusing to roll out.  You need to wet the dough, or your hands, just a tiny bit.  Too much and the dough will smear.

You now need the right amount of pressure worked evenly along the rope so that one end isn’t thicker than the other, so there aren’t lumps.  Once I fan my fingers along its length as far as they will reach, the rope is long enough and the right diameter.  As you try to knot the rope you need to make a gentle loop and thread one end through, watching for breaks along the length of it.  If it begins to split it will pull apart from itself, like loose bark on an old tree and it is ruined.  You have one more chance to smush it together and reroll.  If that attempt fails you are done, because reworking it again will make it tough and dry and inedible.

While they bake you have to be careful not to leave them in too long.  They are supposed to be quite pale.  In fact, if they start to get golden brown you’ve most likely let them go too long.  The only solution for those cookies is a good cup of coffee or tea.  However, underdone cookies are just soggy and dense as the places where the dough knots on itself stay wet much longer then the edges.

When it does work out, you are rewarded with a light, almost-cake cookie that tastes faintly sweet and faintly of citrus and it will remind you of your Nonna if you are lucky enough to be part Sicilian.  And when relatives ask for your recipe you’ll feel proud when your father reminds them that it isn’t just the recipe, it is also the cook who matters.

Occasionally I don’t want a recipe that is fool-proof, I want a recipe that takes a good deal of attention.  I want a recipe that takes problem-solving and technique, grace and patience.  I want to get frustrated and stare sullenly into the flour-powdered air.  I want to do something that does not involve can openers, coupons, crock-pots and a timetable.  I want to take on something challenging that is totally frivolous, and ultimately rewarding.

I keep waiting for a long humid day, one that can absorb the time and effort and irritation that will surely come with these cookies-that will give me the time to let my kids mess around trying to master all the tricks you have to master to do this right.  Hopefully, at least once I’ll be able to before this summer is out.  It is worth it.

Watermelon Mush

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

watermelon

When I was a new mother and had a six-month-old who had begun trying solid foods, some overly concerned women who worked with my husband exclaimed, “She’s home all day and doesn’t make her own baby food?” He relayed that conversation to me with a shrug and support, “You know I don’t care if you make baby food right?” Then he handed me the baby-food cookbooks these women passed to him, to pass on to me and I stared up at him hard. My heart sank so far down. Here was another way I was failing as a mother, how I was wasting hours and giving my baby less than he deserved. Not to my husband, thankfully. Again he said, “I really don’t care one way or the other. They mean well. I brought them home only to shut them up and…well you did like to cook, before.”

I did like to cook before, before I had post-partum depression, before I felt cocooned from the world. The only news from the outside came from women who were preoccupied with how my baby was bottle-fed or how I couldn’t keep my child from mouthing cart handles or how I didn’t steam and puree organic fruits and veggies. But, cooking had always been a way for me to enjoyably fill the hours; sharing a meal with someone I loved made me happy. Maybe I would ignore the books (especially the one which advocated for brewer’s yeast as a snack) and pick some foods that my baby couldn’t get it a jar. I would cook for him.

Pureeing watermelon was an all day project, or else sleep deprivation just made it seem that way. Hacking away the rind, mopping up the pink juices before the ants could find it on the kitchen floor, digging out the food processor and figuring out how to get it put together took too long. Maybe it was the prospect of keeping my baby safely away from sharp objects while entertaining him that may it seem intermitable. Eventually I had a small mound of fuchsia mush I felt somewhat proud of.

My baby took one bite, shot a look up at me that said, “What the hell is this?” and refused to open his mouth again. As I think back now I’m sure the coarse texture paired with an unusually sweet juice startled him and felt wrong. Or perhaps he just knew that this is never what was meant for this poor melon-a spoonful made of loneliness and self-consciousness. I stared at him for a moment before getting up slowly and retrieving Gerber sweet potatoes, which he devoured happily.

I felt just hopeless, because this had failed, because I couldn’t prove to anyone that I was a worthy stay-at-home mother, because I hadn’t saved any watermelon in large juicy crunchy pink triangles for myself. All I had was this slushy, lukewarm pile that not one of us was going to touch. Down the garbage disposal it went.

Today he is seven and a half and just ate about half a watermelon with dinner. I feel vindicated that I hadn’t ruined him for good food. And, I feel extremely angry that I had let some random woman make me feel that I had, that I was not doing enough, that I wasn’t enough because I bought a few, tiny, glass jars once upon a time.

Requiem For a Dessert

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ 2 Comments

Graham Crackers

Requiem for a Dessert

The toffee bars were a failure. It started well enough. The margarine and sugar had melted together the way they should. First, the yellow, translucent, buttery top laid over and soaked the brown sugar. The grains of sugar mounded and washed away, a golden beach as I swirled the melted margarine around the pot in gentle waves. Then the bubbles started rising from the bottom of the pot, struggling one at a time through the beach, fighting to reach the surface, popping inches away from each other in slow succession. Then suddenly there was a flurry of bubbles, the whole surface covered with layers, bubbles climbing on top of each other and slipping back down and climbing again before releasing. The surface tension was high as the concoction got stickier. The toffee coated the back of my wooden spoon. It looked right.

I poured the sugar-butter over little graham cracker rectangles and immediately knew something was wrong. Instead of gliding over the surface of the crackers and then settling in, it sank fast, soaking it all. It looked mushy and bloated like Cheerios left in milk half a morning before being cleared away. I sprinkled pecans over the top, already worried that I had wasted them. I put the tray in the oven. It smelled right.

What should have come out of the oven was a sheet of glossy rectangles, the toffee mixture still bubbling around the edges. I should have been able to let it cool for a few moments and then been able to use a spatula to slide them off the cookie sheet. I would have had to stretch the first few apart because they would have still been too warm, and they would have gotten little taffy tendrils off their edges. As I worked to the back, those toffee bars would have cracked apart cleanly. If I had waited any longer, I would have shattered the last crackers into jagged shards because they sat too long. I would have shoved those broken bits in my mouth to test the batch. A half an hour after that I would have dipped them halfway in chocolate. Eventually, they would have made it to the freezer, and I was going to steal one in the morning as an unhealthy breakfast and maybe a few more after the kids were in bed.

Instead they came out matte. Soggy. The spatula shoved them around without being able to lift them. I pinched a bit to taste. It had the texture of old, badly made pancakes saturated with unremarkable bland sweetness.

This is a eulogy for the toffee bars as they used to be, when I could make them with real butter, before I knew that dairy made pain travel up and down my arms and creep behind my right eye. I’ve used soy cream cheese and ground nuts, Fleischman’s unsalted margarine, vegetable oil and coconut milk to give back to myself those things I’ve had to give up. I’ve made milkshakes, pumpkin pie, lemon knots, carrot cake, chocolate tarts, sugar cookies, cherry cobblers. But something about the chemical properties here didn’t work out. I’m at a loss for how this simple recipe failed so badly.

Some things you can’t replace. Some things are lost, no matter how much you wish that wasn’t so. Goodbye, toffee bars. The best I can do for you now is to remember you, fondly and well.