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  • 18 months

    When the husband and I are talking about parenting these days (something we do a lot of the time, because – parenting! It can be rather all consuming) we find ourselves saying “Oh, he’s so much fun at the moment!”. Around 18 months seems to be the stage for us where the really enjoyable part of having a baby has overtaken the tedious and difficult parts. Having the beginnings of broken conversations with your child is something I find particularly wondrous, and makes up for the downsides of this age (tantrums, hair pulling, and broken sleep – although this has been a feature of having Edward in general, not something limited to a particular age).

    Things I’m enjoying at 18 months:

    1. Conversations! Edward’s sentences generally begin with either “more” or “no”. “More? yoghurt? [lalo]”, “more? high?” [ie. push me higher on the swing, I’m not a baby], “more? book?”, and amusingly, “more? no?” [no more]. I’ve punctuated these in the way that he says them, two words with rising inflections. When I’m talking to him, or to someone in his presence, he busily parrots a word out of each sentence. I’ve taken to spelling some words in order to avoid sudden demands for those things – such as swing, park and yoghurt.

    2. Edward’s daily increasing vocabulary. Recent acquisitions I have particularly enjoyed are “rain” [mame] accompanied by open palms raised to the sky if we happen to be outside, and “niiiiishe”, said with great satisfaction while drinking milk, or slightly less convincingly while sitting on one of the cats showering it with violent toddler affection. I guess all those “Ted! Be nice to the cats!” rubbed off, albeit not exactly as I intended.

    3. Seeing his independence and focus increase. At the weekend I watched Edward buzz off by himself at a park and later at my brother’s house, unconcerned for large periods of time about his parents’ whereabouts, focussing on some particular absorbing thing – a water feature at the park, a zipper on a bag. He watches our faces with great intensity as we talk to him, sometimes silently moving his mouth along with us, frequently parroting words.

    4. The way he listens intently to me while I sing to him (occasionally briskly saying “no!” if a song is not to his liking), and then applauds enthusiastically, grinning, when I’ve finished. I find it extremely endearing, and happily sing the same song multiple times in response to his “more! more!”. The morning I was shrieking at him in a mad falsetto (“Edward! Edward Bear! He is my Edwaaaaaard Beeeear!”. My invented songs tend to be fairly repetitious) which he found inexplicably delightful, and when I tried to switch to a more normal singing voice I was met with “no! more!”. I find I am happy to shriek endlessly in order to see that delighted grin spread across his face. There is no accounting for musical taste.

    Things I’m not enjoying at 18 months:

    1. Edward is a skinny toddler and a pretty erratic eater. I try not to pay too much attention to weight charts, but I was relieved when he almost scraped in to the 10th percentile the last time he was weighed. For some reason, I find the idea of being below the 10th percentile rather worrying. Well, more worrying. He’s not exactly a picky eater, but is disinterested in food a lot of the time. There are so many other things he would rather be doing, like emptying the kitchen cupboards of saucepans. I find this immensely frustrating, not only the process of cooking a meal that is rejected uneaten, but a nagging concern about his weight that, try as I might, is hard to dislodge. This issue is probably the one I spend the most time trying to relax about (given that everything I read about the subject blares in alarm “don’t make food into an issue, whatever you do!”).

    2. Rough outbursts resulting from a mixture of excitement and frustration, which result in hair pulling and head butting, accompanied by mad cackling. We approach these by walking away from him for a bit, or putting him in his room for about 15 seconds or so, which usually serves to break the spell and allow him to calm down.

    3. We’ve just finished a fortnight or so of fairly terrible sleeping (by that, I mean he wakes up about four to five times each night, breastfeeds each time to get back to sleep and sleeps very restlessly). He is now on day four of only-one-wake-up, I’m crossing my fingers that this is going to last for a while.

    4. I wouldn’t say breastfeeding is something I’m not enjoying, exactly, but I’m rather tired of it. I go back and forth about weaning Edward, as I hope it will improve his sleeping. Initially I was hoping he would wean himself, but as that doesn’t seem to be happening, in a few months I will probably enlist the husband’s help in cutting out night feeds completely.

  • Wrapping up – 7 best recipes of the year

    As part of smugly congratulating myself on cooking 100 new things, I had a scroll through my round-up posts, and thought I would list down my very favourite and/or most momentous recipes from the year. [Most momentous because I’ve listed the first Ottolenghi salad I made, and I know I am tediously repetitious on the subject, but every single one of his salad recipes are the best salad ever. But I can’t make an entire list of Ottolenghi salads. So the first one can stand in for all of them.]

    1. Carrot Soup with Tahini and Roasted Chickpeas, recipe number 3 featured in the first round-up. It was one of those recipes where I really appreciated how all the slightly fiddly steps came together into essential flavour components.

    2. Slow Braised Pork Shoulder with Cider – recipe number 4 in the first round-up. My first real attempt at braising and with such a spectacular result.

    3. Date & Spinach Salad – my first Ottolenghi recipe! Recipe number 22 in the third round-up. It was the first in my “holy hell, this salad is amazing – oh, it’s an Ottolenghi recipe” revelations for the year.

    4. Thomas Keller’s recipe for roast chicken – recipe number 39 in the fifth round-up. It was so very simple and resulted in such perfect juicy chicken.

    5. Tourtiere – recipe number 54 from the sixth round-up. The first time I’d made a proper meat pie in this way, and this pork pie has a wonderful combination of flavours.

    6. Strawberry & Rhubarb Pie – recipe number 71 from the seventh round-up. Mostly because it reminds me of this period when we were eating ever so many strawberries, strawberry and rhubarb is such a wonderful sweet/tart combo, and it was an amazing pie.

    7. Shooters’ Sandwich – recipe number 97 from the last round-up. Just a truly awesome sandwich, and I like how portable it is.

  • 100 new recipes: part nine and last

    The project is finished! 100 new recipes in a year. It was great fun cooking so many new things, I discovered chefs that I’m now very fond of (Ottolenghi!) and made some completely new-to-me things such as yoghurt. I can’t say I kept up a consistent cooking pace and flagged at some points – my success owes a great deal to Vaxen’s unfailing enthusiasm and sourcing of recipes for me. Thanks Vaxen!

    94/100: Stromboli – from this recipe. Basically a rolled pizza and pretty much as awesome as that concept sounds.

    95/100: Eggplant Pie – from this recipe. Roasted eggplant is one of the most wonderful things in the world, and this silky cheesy pie is gorgeous.

    96/100: Honey Maple Pumpkin Loaf – from this recipe. Lovely moist pumpkin loaf, greeted with toddler approval, during a period when so very few things were.

    97/100: Shooters’ Sandwich – from this recipe. This whole concept is awesome. Squashing steaks and a caramelised onion mix inside a cob loaf overnight equals a really delicious sandwich, in wonderfully picnic-friendly slices.

    98/100: Espresso Brownies – from this recipe. Very simple recipe makes a rather flat square of subtly coffee flavoured brownies.

    99/100: Jamaican Black Cake – from half of this recipe. I didn’t make it as smoothly as a lot of picture you can see online, and it’s yet to be eaten – it smells amazing though (as I have it stored and am topping it up with rum, prior to Christmas Day). I totally stuffed up the burned sugar – it solidified into toffee. Update: post Christmas eating of cake – wonderful! Heady with fruit and rum, and didn’t obviously suffer from lack of burned sugar.

    100/100: Cranberry & Pistachio Cookies – adapted from this recipe. I replaced the strawberries with dried cranberries and plums. Lovely buttery little cookies.

    Et finis! I had so much fun actually completing a year long project that I’m now thinking about potential cooking projects for 2014, and trying not to settle on anything too excessively ambitious.

    (Bonus 101/100 because it seems odd not to count the new recipe I made tonight – Ottolenghi’s Crisp Couscous Cakes from this recipe. These are gorgeous, albeit slightly tricky to keep together in neat little cakes – the perfect balance of crispness and softness, and the salty feta and sweet sultanas (in the case of my slightly amended recipe) worked beautifully together.

  • 100 new recipes: part eight

    The penultimate update! Only seven recipes to go.

    73/100: Herb, Tofu & Kidney Bean Stew – from this recipe. This stew had such a beautiful combination of flavours, although it was an irritatingly fiddly recipe in terms of the steps involved. Freezing, defrosting then baking the tofu makes it wonderfully chewy.

    74/100: Brioche – from this recipe. A two day process, with the number of risings, but relatively easy to make otherwise, and deliciously rich and soft.

    75/100: Sardine & Breadcrumb Pasta – from this recipe. Lovely fishy pasta, with the bite of capers and crunchy breadcrumbs, and very quick to make.

    76/100: Curried Carrot Soup – from this recipe. Warmly spicy soup, and gets the toddler seal of approval when mixed with congee.

    77, 78 & 79/100: Roast Chicken, Mushroom & Leek Stuffing and Waldorf Salad – Waldorf salad from this recipe, mushroom and leek stuffing from this recipe, and roast chicken from Joy of Cooking. All three recipes went so well together – juicy roast chicken, rich mushroom stuffing and the crisp salad.

    80/100: Congee – from this recipe. It’s barely a recipe – chicken stock and rice – but the slow cooking makes such a delicious rice porridge, perfect for babies.

    81/100: Banana Bread with Honey – from this recipe. I replaced the sugar with honey – this was a very banana-y banana bread, very well received by the toddler.

    82/100: West African Peanut Soup – from this recipe. A lovely spicy sweet potato soup.

    83/100: Late Night Coffee Brined Chicken – from this recipe. I over brined the chicken, and it was a little too salty, but the coffee gave it a really lovely flavour.

    84/100: Carrot & Quinoa Cake – from this recipe. I didn’t make the frosting, replaced the cup of sugar with half a cup of honey and soaked the dates in hot water before adding them in. It was delicious – very moist, and I felt the quinoa gave it a nice nutritional boost for the toddler.

    85/100: Upside Down Buttermilk Pear Cake – from this recipe. This is such a quick recipe – a really easy batter, and sliced pears and sugar and butter syrup making the upside down topping. Beautiful caramel flavours.

    86/100: Pumpkin Chickpea Almond Butter Bars – from this recipe. Another really lovely light cake for the toddler, full of chickpeas, almond butter, pumpkin and eggs.

    87/100: Broccoli Salad with Hazelnut Romesco – from this recipe. Smokey romesco sauce goes beautifully over the almost crisp broccoli.

    88/100: Beet Pesto Pasta – from this recipe. This was such a pretty recipe! Pretty pink pasta, slightly less pretty when hurled around the place by a toddler during “dinner”, and such lovely earthy flavours, with crunchy bits of pistachio.

    89/100: Bloody Mary Burgers – from this recipe. I hadn’t really considered not overworking mince in burgers before, but it apparently makes a difference – these were so juicy, with a nice spicy kick from the sauces.

    90/100: Cocoa Banana Bread – from this recipe. Deeply rich chocolate banana bread.

    91/100: Herb Roasted Lamb Chops – from this recipe. Essentially a basic herb marinade, but god it was good with the lamb – garlicky and delicious.

    92/100: Banana & Sour Cream Pancakes – adapted from from Smitten Kitchen’s cookbook. These are amazingly rich soft pancakes, and the slices of banana caramelise well.

    93/100: Piadinas – from this recipe. I’d never made a fried quick bread before, and these were great – very quick and easy to make. (And probably would have cooked more evenly in a better frying pan. I need a cast iron skillet.)

  • Sleep

    On nights when Ted isn’t sleeping well, I sometimes sleep on a swag on the floor of his room with him snuggled up against me. This arrangement is not very comfortable, partly because it’s a single mattress and partly because Ted is a restless sleeper. This morning at around 4.30 he was thrashing around in an irritated manner, then rolled and draped himself over my head and relaxed, snoring sonorously into my ear. I used to worry about his weight as he’s not very high up in the percentile charts, but I can now definitively say that when he is lying across your head, he feels rather weighty.

    The nights of broken sleep over the 15 months of his life have made me regularly frustrated, but sometimes, more often now, I can find enjoyment in sitting with him at night – watching him staring into the dimly lit room, or finally sleeping, his mouth slack, limbs relaxed floppily in strange positions. It reminds me of the first night after he was born when I couldn’t sleep, lying on my hospital bed just staring at the baby lying in the cot beside me, watching his chest rise and fall in tiny movements. My memory has mistily dispensed with the sounds of a woman vomiting and crying and a baby howling that were in fact keeping me awake. Now there’s just a single picture of me gazing at tiny Edward, thinking to myself that I should really sleep, but unable to look away.

  • 15 months

    We’ve moved into the world of toddler – Edward starting walking, suddenly, at around 14 months, and now a month later he walks and runs everywhere. Usually while shouting and smashing things.

    Things I’m enjoying at 15 months:
    1. Having a mobile toddler. I like walking around with him, hand in hand (although he generally prefers to charge around on his own), and watching him explore things on his own that were hard for him before he could walk. When we’re at the park, he runs towards the playground shouting “Eeeee! Eeeee!” with excitement (“Whee!”).
    2. Hearing about the swimming lessons he goes to each week with his father – he can swim towards someone underwater now, and grips onto you carefully in the water without needing to be held. Watching him progress at things and learn new skills is so intensely enjoyable.
    3. Watching him interact with his cousin, with whom he spends two days a week – he has a special name for her, and they press their faces tenderly together by way of greeting. Yesterday I watched her tow him off by the hand to show him something. I thought they would have to be older to have that kind of connection, and it’s lovely to see such affection between them already.
    4. Finally, finally taking more pleasure and interest in eating. A few days ago he used a fork by himself for the first time, reasonably accurately, and stuffed himself with sardine and caper pasta. Perhaps I don’t have a picky child after all.

    Things I’m not enjoying at 15 months:
    1. Molars. Dear lord. For a while I was back to sleeping on the floor of his room for part of the night which I had very much hoped to be done with by the time he was this age.
    2. Testing boundaries and the beginning of temper tantrums. Proto-tantrums. He delights in doing things that are forbidden – looking at me and laughing with excitement while grabbing for something he’s not allowed to touch. I weary of (mostly calmly) saying no. I imagine there is ever so much more of that in my future.

  • 100 new recipes: part seven

    62/100: Braised Pork with Cabbage – from this recipe. Ridiculously easy, tender pork. Also, braising. I love braising.

    63/100: Roasted Eggplant with Crispy Chickpeas – from a recipe in the Smitten Kitchen book, written about here. Nice easy unattended-in-the-oven dish, and the combo of silky roasted eggplant and crunchy chickpeas is great.

    64/100: Bread Pudding – from this recipe. Lovely cheesy pudding, a big hit for breakfast with my one year old.

    65/100: Grilled Chicken with Dry Spice Rub – from this recipe. For some reason I’d never made a dry rub before – this was great, lovely combination of spices.

    66/100: Challah – from Mark Bittman’s recipe.

    67/100: Mixed Bean Salad – from this recipe. Ottolenghi salad. Marvellous, as always.

    68/100: Spiced Chickpea Salad – from this recipe. Another Ottolenghi salad (I served both this one and the Mixed Bean Salad at the same lunch). This one is amazing – the spices on the chickpeas are beautiful, and I loved the mixture of vegetables, including radishes.

    69/100: Fresh Cheese – from Mark Bittman’s recipe, described here. A little bland, and could have done with more salt and more compression, but was lovely crumbled over salad, and an interesting experiment.

    70/100: Oatmeal Cookies with Dried Peaches – from this recipe. Lovely chewy oatmeal cookies, and dried peaches are delightful.

    71/100: Strawberry & Rhubarb Pie – from this recipe. Strawberries were plentiful and cheap here this winter. This was a beautiful pie – not only the beautiful pink filling, but the sweet and tart mixture of the strawberries and rhubarb was perfect. Looking at the photo of it makes me want another slice. I don’t make enough pies.

    72/100: Red Wine Velvet Cake – from Smitten Kitchen’s cookbook, described here. This was a lovely birthday cake – the red wine doesn’t quite cook out and it has a headily intense flavour with the chocolate.

  • Links to things, all the things

    Transcience of All Things in Life
    The 2013 Hugo Awards were announced this week. Tansy Rayner Roberts won for Best Fan Writer, which I found exciting as I’m a fan of her blog writing and podcasting, as well as her published work. She is also the first Australian woman to win a Hugo.

    Ken Liu’s Mono No Aware won Best Short Story, and I really enjoyed it.

    “Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: It’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life. The sun, the dandelion, the cicada, the Hammer, and all of us: We are all subject to the equations of James Clerk Maxwell and we are all ephemeral patterns destined to eventually fade, whether in a second or an eon.”

    A couple of other pieces of fiction from the shortlist that I enjoyed reading were Catherynne M Valente’s Fade to White, and Aliette de Bodard’s Immersion.

    Feeding Your Baby’s Brain, With Its Nasty, Big, Pointy Teeth
    Subversive Reader is doing a series of “provocations” with her son, the first of which she writes about here. Provocations are a concept from the educational philosophy of Reggio Emilia, and are a collection of materials presented to a child, based on the child’s past knowledge or interests, to provoke and extend the child’s thinking.

    I am going through a stage of parenting that I go through every few months, where my son’s abilities and development change, and I am yet to catch up in terms of providing him with interesting, engaging experiences. (I mean, obviously he is not locked in a featureless room all day, but I like to occasionally provide him with more stimulation than “here are your toys, have at it.”) I like the idea of providing the occasional structured activity like this – putting together items that Edward may not have played with together before. I haven’t done any water play with him outside a pool or bath, and I think he would probably enjoy another activity with water (as long as I have a change of clothes nearby. Edward is quite… enthusiastic when it comes to water. “An ocean! Let me crawl into it at full speed!”)

    Pretty Things
    I imagine being able to create art like this (and being able to collaborate with your child to make such beautiful drawings) is immensely satisfying.

    This is an incredibly beautiful picture of Mars (created from several layers of images).

  • Challah

    While I was making this loaf of challah, glancing down occasionally at my son “playing” around my feet (in other words, unravelling a roll of alfoil and emptied a drawer of baking implements), I realised that I hadn’t been making bread recently because breadmaking is a little more difficult with a toddler, or proto-toddler, than it is with a largely inert baby. Needing to make sudden interventions or pick up a grizzling child is hard when your hands are covered in dough. This excuse sounds ridiculous when the kneading part of breadmaking only comprises a few minutes, but for some reason there is always some baby-related disaster during those few minutes. He has a knack for it.

    This is Mark Bittman’s recipe for challah, the “traditional Sabbath bread of European Jews”. It is a lovely soft, eggy bread, but is best eaten on the day it’s made, as it gets a bit dry. Second-day-challah is perfect for bread pudding or French toast, both of which are met with enthusiastic proto-toddler approval.

    ingredients:
    650 grams flour
    2 teaspoons salt
    2 teaspoons instant yeast
    1 tablespoon honey
    3 eggs plus 1 egg yolk
    325ml milk, warmed
    poppy seeds or coarse salt for sprinkling, egg for egg glaze

    Sprinkle the yeast into the warm milk, and leave it for five minutes, until it’s foamy and active.

    Put the flour and salt into a large bowl. Crack the eggs and egg yolk into the middle, add the honey, then pour in the milk and yeast mixture. Mix everything together roughly with a fork, so that it’s mostly sticking together. Mark Bittman says if it’s dry, add in a little bit of milk until it’s wet enough to knead. He claims it is unlikely to be too wet. Mine was too wet, making me presume that I’d done something wrong along the way. Or perhaps Mr Bittman is simply too presumptuous about the state of my dough. (Oh, and obviously if it is too wet to knead, add a little bit of flour at a time until it’s kneadable.)

    Check the whereabouts of your baby and hand them a distracting toy, because you’re about to get your hands covered in dough. Dump your rough mass of dough out onto your counter and knead away. It doesn’t need too much, just a few minutes until it’s smooth and elastic under your hands. Clean the bowl, and give it a light coating of oil. Pop the dough back into the bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and leave it for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until it’s roughly doubled in size.

    Punch down the dough, and divide it into three similarly sized balls – weighing them if you want a nice evenly braided loaf. Leave the balls of dough to rest for about 15 minutes, then roll them out into ropes – about 36cm long, but there’s no need to be exact about it. You want your loaf to fit onto your baking tray (you should probably find a baking tray and lightly oil it, by the way). You can create all sorts of complicated braided loafs, or you can just plait your three strands like hair, and tuck the ends under. Let the dough rest for 30 minutes while you heat your oven up to 190C. Just before putting the bread in the oven, whisk up an egg and brush it over the loaf. (Generally, recipes call for an egg yolk, or an egg yolk plus a little water, but I’ve never seen the point of seperating an egg. This article on glazing kind of backs me up. Well, not really, but it concludes that many forms of glazing are acceptable.) If you like, sprinkle the glazed loaf with poppy seeds or coarse salt.

    Cook the bread for 40 to 50 minutes, or until it’s nicely golden and sounds hollow when you tap the bottom of the loaf. I’m always a bit paranoid about undercooking bread, and I think I left this in a teenst bit too long, judging by the crust.

  • Stars

    It was dark when I arrived home tonight, and unbuckled Ted from his carseat, hooking his bags over my arms. We paused in the garden before heading up the stairs towards the house, and I pointed up to the sky. “Look up there, Ted – can you see the stars?” His head tilted back, nestled in next to mine and he gazed upwards with his mouth open, his warm breath puffing on my cheek smelling of milk and the strawberries he’d just eaten. The faint light from the house was shining in his eyes and he had an expression of astounded wonder on his face which he gets several times a day (generally while looking at rather more prosaic things). Seeing that expression is one of my favourite things in the world. It makes my heart ache.

    “Ahhh! Baaah!” he exclaimed, waving his arm excitedly upwards. “That’s the Milky Way. And that… I think that’s part of Orion. Aren’t they beautiful?” He repeated his “baaaaah” which I took as agreement, and then he turned away, distracted by the sound of the frogs calling from the dam, moment of wonder at an end. We walked up the stairs, unlocked the door, and went inside.