Monday, February 22, 2010
~ everybody's fancy ~
One of my favorite times last weekend was when she placed on her head the pink towel with ears, stitched on front with the name Beatrice, and declared that she was a bunny named Ralph the Rabbit. And then on top of the towel she crowned herself with a small blue plastic laundry basket upside-down, stepping around the room while singing a song. And then she asked me to sing "Everybody's Fancy" from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the towel swirling behind her like a cape.
4:21 PM
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Sunday, February 21, 2010
~ fun with spaghetti ~
As a bachelor in the fourth decade of my life, I was simultaneously bemused and insulted when my future mother-in-law once asked if I knew how to cook, specifically if I knew how to boil water. Why, anyone can cook spaghetti, and it doesn't take a Ph.D. in chemistry to know how to boil water.
Still, with all the variations of pasta and ways to spice up sauces, there are entire families of dishes I haven't cooked.
Last night I cobbled together a bastard variation of haluski, leaving out the cabbage because I'm not a big fan. Boil water (see above) and cook spaghetti (we don't buy egg noodles). Meanwhile, sauté onions in olive oil until translucent, then just to the point of gentle caramelization. Along the way, occasionally spoon some pasta water into the sauté pan, to keep the onions from drying out. Drain spaghetti and toss with a bit of olive oil. Portion out the pasta and onions in a bowl and toss with freshly ground black pepper and sea salt.
This morning I thought I'd use the leftover spaghetti to make a spaghetti omelet, thinking I was being inventive and all. But I found out today that this is not an original dish; just Google "spaghetti omelet". Anyhow, I decided this morning to make a mushroom garlic scramble instead.
Mark Bittman, Mark Bittman. Marissa is on a Mark Bittman kick, everything she's been cooking over the past few weeks has had his name on it. She used last night's leftover spaghetti to complement a spinach tomato sauce, and also made something called "bread salad", which is a dish best served cold, of leftover bread (homemade, mostly whole wheat, thanks to Mark Bittman), balsamic vinegar, citrus juice, olive oil, basil, and tomatoes. It turns out the tomatoes were the dominant flavor in both, the sauce was a bit thin for my liking, and the bread salad a bit sour. But I found that mixing both of them together and reheating in the microwave made a great dish, which I suppose would be called spaghetti salad.
Tonight I cooked dinner, a non-Mark Bittman meal, with pan-fried salmon and my stylized haluski, made this time with farfalle -- bow-tie or "butterfly" pasta -- because we had run out of spaghetti. Maybe next time I'll make the egg noodles from scratch. It doesn't look all that difficult. And maybe I'll even add some cabbage, since that's one of Marissa's favorite foods. But Mark Bittman can eat me if he thinks that I'm going to use whole wheat flour on the first go at this.
4:28 PM
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~ delightful ~
Some misinterpretations from Beatrice:
Little Dreamer Boy - a misreading of the title of a Christmas carol
Rainbow Collection - sung by Jason Mraz or Kermit the Frog
snoo - a misreading of "sew", for her wooden toys to be threaded with laces
(she also says "unsnoo", and in the past week "soo" as well as "sew")
Qboda - her favorite fast-food restaurant I also love the way she makes up songs, like the one while we were flying last December to Las Vegas, en route to Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
One planet went in the circle, Nova
One planet went in the circle, Nova
One planet went in the circle, Nova
Then it went to slee-eep And the omnipresent rhythm from earlier in her life:
So, so... so so so Actually, while I was writing this she started to sing another song. Sometimes she makes up her own lyrics, or reads from a book, or just strings together a series of sounds to go along with a melody that she already knows; sometimes she makes up a song out of whole cloth. It's all so delightful.
9:09 AM
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