A Dry Run at Easter

Our Easter afternoon plans started out ambitious.  We were going to have a bunch of friends over for Easter dinner after church - a couple of families with children and a fine assortment of handcrafted singles had our attendance list up to fourteen, counting us and counting kids.  But then the balloon began to deflate.  One guy had to work.  Another was subjected to familial guilt until he bowed out a broken man to spend the holiday with his family.  An emergency gall badder surgery took another family out of action, then L caught walking pneumonia, which effectively drove the last of our holdout invitees running for the hills.  So what do you do when you're poised and ready to feed an army, but the army is off fighting other wars?  You hold training exercises!

Thoroughly undaunted, we rescheduled everyone for Easter Dinner Part Deux next week, then proceeded to trial run all the recipes we would otherwise have winged.  What we could store for a week we shelved, but the bulk of the dinner was executed to plan.  The menu was roast leg of lamb with a balsamic vinegar glaze, roasted root vegetables (rutabaga, parsnips and carrots) with rosemary, cold steamed asparagus with a curry dipping sauce, and a small bottle of chilled bubbly.  Stacy had also tucked away a special strawberry pie for the occasion.  The exercises were both tactical and strategic and many lessons-learned were accumulated during the campaign.  For example, asparagus doesn't need 8 minutes in the steamer unless you're actually shooting for something that looks like emerald paste at the end.  Similarly 400°F might be the right temp to quick fire a plain ole roast, but it was a wee too hot for a glazed one - lower the temp and extend the time.  The root veggies had been peeled and diced the evening before and had sat the night zip-locked in the fridge drenched in olive oil, all of which should have been drained off prior to trying to roast them.  But all in all the faux pas were cosmetic and things turned out well.

I wasn't expecting great things from the kids with regard to the lamb - N made a point of mentioning how badly it smelled cooking at least three times (and he had a point) - but when it came time to plate it all up, there was a rather dramatic change of heart.  I had timed it to be medium, but the roast was chubby in the center and tapered at the end, so there was actually a fairly nice variety of levels of "doneness" to choose from.  The kids, to Stacy's quivering horror, demanded only the bright red pieces that quivered as she did.  I thought the first morsel would cure them of that (while Stacy thought it more likely to poison them), but the young tykes showed themselves to be true carnivores and chomped it down cool and red.  They both had second helpings; N actually went back to the well four times.  (Mary may have had a little lamb, but N's portion was substantial.) Even Stacy seemed pleased with her much more grayish selection.

But everyone agreed the evening standout was the strawberry pie.  I'm not normally a strawberry pie person. I've been abused too much at the hands of Marie Calendars and her towering monstrosities of cardboard berries and red rubber glaze.  But this was different.  Stacy had gone to the farmers market earlier in the week to get some berries and had been thoroughly disappointed with the early season offerings.  She was about to abandon the idea when she saw a stand off by itself selling a varietal called "Gaviota" strawberries.  They were very pricey, about double what the other berries ran, so she didn't really consider them until the vendor thrust a sample at her.  Her later description of the experience made me think of 70's flower children and their stories about first trying acid. She plunked down more jingle than I'd like to think about and came away with a future strawberry pie par excellence.  This brings me to a final lesson learned for the Easter dry run:  A single Gaviota strawberry pie will simply not cut it for a party of fourteen.

Random Familial Oddities

Assembling bedroom furniture

Things have been monstrously busy in our household of late. I've been working tons of hours to keep caught up at work and when I'm home our days and nights have been pretty much exclusively dedicated to the bedroom swap and office gutting and all the associated paraphernalia displacement that that brought about. There has been nearly no downtime. I've not posted much as a result, though, certainly, the world has continued to swirl and gyrate around us. As I'm not expecting things to improve in the immediate near term, I figured I'd better take a moment or two to share a couple of quick mini-stories and mildly interesting encounters, lest I forget them in the endless flow through of time. Most of them feature N who has been prolific in his musings and ponderings of late. Enjoy.

N: Did you know that when you go potty, your brains come out? That's the first thing that comes out!

I never realized how prone our house was to volcanic eruptions. They have been ubiquitous of late. Luckily the kids have a top bunk to flee to, which they do quite often. (Evidently Mommies and Daddies are immune to hot lava.) The lava flows, I am told, usually reach 100 feet, but that is not a concern, because N assures me that the top bunk is a "googelin" feet high.

N: Mommy, are hippopotamuses octurtles?

Mommy: Yes, they stay up at night.

I walked down the hall one morning to notice L in the bathroom doing her business tinkling with the door wide open. She was yelling out brusk instructions to N who was in the living room setting up things on a little TV table. "You have to make sure everything is done by the time I get back," she yelled.

"What are you doing?" I asked from my hallway vantage point.

"Playing school. I'm the teacher and N's the principal," she responded.

"I hope the teachers are a little more discrete than this at your school," I observed. "And generally speaking, the principal is the teacher's boss, so he should be giving you instructions."

She thought about this a moment, perched upon her seat of contemplation, and then promptly demoted N. "Then he's a teacher's aide."

N: Daddy, do you make satellites at work?

Daddy: Yes, I do indeed.

N: Is making satellites very hard?

Daddy: Yes, it is very hard.

N: Daddy, you should get used to it, because you've been doing it a very long time. Or you should do something easier.

I recall a similar conversation a month or two ago with my functional manager.

I had my traditional Saturday morning tea yesterday with the kids. Nate decided he wanted his hot tea made into ice tea, so I put it in the fridge and set the timer for an hour. N camped out in front of the timer and plaintively called the play-by-play.  "Daddy, it says 5-8! Is it ready? ... It's 5-7! Is it ready? ... " Ten minutes in and he showed no signs of waning enthusiasm.

Everyone I've told this story to asks me why I didn't must put ice in it. Don't really know myself, but for the sake of looking like a rational and engaged father, I'll claim it was to provide an object lesson to teach him the difference between a hour and minutes and seconds. Yeah, that's why I did it that way.

At any rate, I don't know if he has any improved sense of scale regarding our standard units of time, but he has developed an engineering nerd's fascination with timing everything and anything. He made us explain how to set the timer on the stove so that it's "counting down" instead of "counting up" and now he engages himself regularly in timing the minutia of our daily lives. I've realized now that I can't hold him off any longer with the standard "wait a minute" deferral, because he will do exactly that, and let you know just how much you've exceeded your promise.

Perkins Palace of Pancake Pleasures

L was up at 6:00 with me this morning, so I put her to good use as a short order cook and had her help me whip up a batch of pancakes. The smoke detector only shrieked into the early morning quiet twice, so it was, all-in-all, a successful cooking adventure.  The alarm, however, summoned N who complained all teary-eyed about being woken up, but who was nevertheless extremely offended at being told he could always go back to bed.

The pancakes were soon piled on plates with butter and maple syrup at the ready.  There were regular-sized pancakes for general consumption; there were a couple of inch wide mini-pancakes for kid giggles, and there was one gigantic Daddy pancake that took up an entire plate.  Again, N was offended at not being offered a Daddy pancake.  L managed to get a good pint or two of syrup on hers before I caught her.  Meanwhile I seemed to be having some sort of isolated memory-loss event with N with regards to buttering his pancakes.  I could have sworn that I'd put butter on them twice already, but evidence appeared to indicate the contrary.  I sliced off what seemed to me to be a third pat and laid it on N's pancakes and stared it down a second or two to make sure it didn't disappear before my eyes.  It did.  On the end of N's fork.  "It tastes better before it's melted," said N through a mouthful of grease.

The kids agreed that these were the best pancakes ever and N suggested that we "open a house where we make only pancakes and let people come and eat them.  Kids wouldn't have to pay anything."  I started to point out the shortcomings of a business model that didn't charge the most ambitious customers, but I reconsidered.  Maybe we didn't have to charge the kids for the pancakes so long as we charged them for butter and syrup by the pound.