"Communism did to the national cuisine what it did to so much else and reduced it to the lowest common denominator: uniform and bland stodge characterised by poor ingredients, low standards and low expectations."
food and cooking
Corn!
L is such a picky eater. She's a first child: we really didn't know what we were doing. We followed this book's advice tempered with that person's wisdom and those mothers' experience. We're doing things a bit differently with E. He eats what we eat, and he has from the moment we could give him solid food. As a result, he's not a picky eater.
There are a few culinary preferences that the Boy and L have in common, though, and one of them is corn on the cob.
L hummed and purred as she ate, working it back and forth like a typewriter paper carriage. The Boy makes use of a variety of methods: the double-handed high hold, the single-handed nibble-from-the-end, the single-handed reverse grip flute position (the right hand would be gripping a flute from the top, not the bottom), and variants of them all.
Occasionally, something not-quite-right hits him, and he balls up his fist and his face into what looks like a mysterious sourness.
But he gets over it, takes a new grip, and continues.
Spaghetti!
Every parent has this picture. I know that somewhere, in an album packed away in a box somewhere in my folks’ condo, there is a picture of me eating spaghetti.
What is it about spaghetti that it’s an almost-universally favorite food among toddlers?
Polish Ketchup
The Girl has decided that Polish ketchup, with its hint of pungency and its lack of sweetness of its American counterpart, is most decidedly not for her.
Breakfast
Feeding
It can be a joyful experience, with smiles and giggles and obvious relief on the face of the starving Boy. He opens his mouth wide; he waits patiently for the spoon; he closes his mouth slowly and seems to relish and inhale the food at the same time.
It can be a tragedy, with fussing and battling, with a head jerking back and forth in an almost desperate attempt to say "No!," with hands flailing and pushing away the spoon to make sure the message gets through.
Whatever the case, the cleaning that follows can be Herculean. Food smeared here, there and everywhere. Dried caked food on the chin, the cheeks, the forehead.
But it always ends the same.
Food is joy for the little man. All food. Any food. He tries it all, rejects almost nothing, and seems to relish even the most exotic offering.
Truth be told, that's a bit of a relief compared to the Girl, who still squawks and squeals whenever we try to get something new in her.
Change is good.
Bearing Gifts
With K and the Boy back, things are returning to normal. Which is to say, there's more mess -- why does doubling the child count quadruple the mess? -- and more noise. The mess, well, I could live without; the noise is the best soundtrack to my life I could imagine.
When K returns from Poland, she always brings gifts from the family for us all. (It makes it sound like she's often going to Poland alone when in fact this was just the second such trip.) This year's theme for the Girl: logic games. One in particular, sort of an ever-changing maze, has captivated the Girl. She sat this morning at the refrigerator, twisting and turning the various mechanisms, making this and that pattern. The Boy, on the other hand, was thrilled with the bagel wrapper and his newly discovered skill of scooting around in a circle.
For her part, K brought back a new love of good old fashioned Polish rosol.
A whole chicken, some parsnips, carrots, and celery, and several hours of slow simmering produces the ultimate comfort food.
Comfort food now for all of us.
Bake Me a Cake As Fast As You Can
With the year winding down, I suppose the temptation is to try to grow thoughtful about the year. Think of milestones and such. But sometimes, it's good just to bake.
It's good just to find good gingerbread recipe and make an evening out of the baking and decorating to gingerbread men.
To try novel concepts, like gingerbread/chocolate chip cookies.
Wigilia Vigil
As Christmas Eve (Wigilia) nears, the work pace turns frantic. The fact that Wigilia falls on a Monday this year makes things even more frantic. We have Sunday requirements to work into our Wigilia preparation work load. We split up Mass duty: K goes at 9:00, I go at 11:00. That leaves me with the little ones to entertain for a while.
"Let's play Memory," I suggest to L. I know it's a losing proposition: she always wins. "Because it's princesses!" she shouts in explanation as she heads up to her room. "I wonder how well you'd fare against me with a cigar band memory game," I laugh to myself as she rifles through her game drawer. Unable to find the cards she returns somewhat dejected until I suggest that she make her own.
"Great idea! I'll make them of my friends."
Something tells me I'll fare no better with this version, but before long, she has pairs of drawings of this best friend from school and that best friend in general -- the best best friend -- as well as assorted other friends and acquaintances. But really, at this age, most of her friends are her best friends, so she draws them all. We never get to play the game, though, because Mama returns from Mass and we head out, exchanging the Boy in the process.
As the afternoon approaches and the weather warms, K kicks us out. "I have more baking to do, and I don't need the three of you in my hair." The Boy and I head out for our usual walk, the loop I've been taking him on for seven months now. Strange how that has turned into something of a thermometer and chronometer: when we began the walks, we had to head out early in the morning, for by lunch time, it was entirely too hot; now we have to wait until after lunch because before the mornings are entirely too cold.
But perhaps not cold enough, for yesterday I mowed (!!) in a tee shirt, and today, I only need a long sleeve shirt to keep off the chill. Some might be tempted to envy, but believe me, it's the other way around: I envy those who have a true, cold Christmas.
We take a detour with the Girl as she rides up the street to visit one of her friends, who in turn decides to head back down to our house with us. I see them into the house then head off with the Boy.
K, in the meantime, is battling American cocoa.
"It behaves differently from what I'm used to in Poland," she explained years ago, before she mastered -- more or less -- the local options. She still probably doesn't like it as much as what she grew up with, but that's really understandable. Not many of us would prefer the new to what we've made memories from.
Once the Slovakian Hedgehogs (as the cakes are called in Polish) are done, L decides she's going to leave one for Santa.
"But today is only the twenty-third!" one might respond. Well, clearly such an individual knows little about the Polish tradition (at least my Polish in-laws' tradition) of opening presents on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas day. In that case, Santa must come at some point during the evening of the twenty-third. It makes no sense otherwise.
We don't know how much of this is play with the Girl and how much is genuine belief. She once told me that she knew that I was Santa, but she seems to be playing along these days as if she's clueless. It's more fun for us all that way. Among other things, I get to write the thank you note from Santa:
Dear L,
Thank you for the cake, milk, prunes, and carrot. Mrs. Claus will be very happy to hear about the carrot: she always says I need to lose a bit of weight. But can you imagine a skinny Santa? Me neither!
Please apologize to your mother for me. I had to use some of her paper to wrap your presents. Rudolf got a little rowdy coming over, and the sleigh tipped to one side, and all the wrapping paper fell into the Atlantic Ocean.
Finally, I know you were a bit disappointed with the little slip of paper in your stocking. Relax: it's just a note to help you find the actual gift. You need a bigger stocking, girl!
Until next year,
Santa
In the stocking, a surprise for tomorrow evening -- something she's never quite experienced.
First Nudges to Perfection
It's one of the ironies we seem never really to pay attention to, but we're always aiming at perfection. Granted, the apathetic eighth-grader's bar is significantly lower than many adults', but there exists for even the most uninspired a standard, despite his protests to the contrary.
Perhaps there's even an element of national identity in this. I know from experience that the average Pole's definition of "perfectly clean" is several steps above my own. And my own definition is several degrees more severe than the Girl's, whose idea of cleaning up consists of stacking everything that was on the floor into piles on the two tables -- one ostensibly for drawing and reading, the other for playing -- in her room. And so yesterday, we began our first nudges to the perfection implicit in Wigilia (the traditional Polish Christmas Eve meal) by cleaning the Girl's room.
The Boy, in the meantime, cooed and cackled as he played with one of L's old toys, oblivious to the Girl's struggle, yet to be completed, against chaos. His standard for perfection is at the most elementary level: clean diaper, rested soul, full belly. Any one of those three perfections drop out of alignment and we all know about it. It's really very simple, though. There's no guessing, no games. No misleading. No implication. He cries and we do two things: sniff and look at the clock.
It's all about the little steps to perfection, the little steps that often leave a bit of a mess. Like in the Girl's mouth.
"Tata, my new tooth still hasn't begun to grow," she bemoaned yesterday. It takes time, like any perfecting, but what can I tell her? I don't remember how long it took for my own teeth to grow back, and since she's the oldest in the family, there's no familial metric. Still, reassurances were in order.
"It will take time," was about the only thing one could say. Not nearly as much time as the other things in life you'll try to perfect: your temper (still working on mine); your restlessness when bored (ditto); your frustration when things don't work as you think they should (hey, did you inherit all my flaws?).
"Certainly my impatience costs me," I thought to myself leaving L to more cleaning. Just the other day, I'd rushed to mulch the leaves in the lower portion of our backyard before going through and checking for hazards. The result was mind- and blade-bending. And so today, before I could really even begin much of anything on my list, I went to a big box hardware to get a replacement.
The girls, though, had other duties. It seems the twenty-second is baking day in our house. It was, at least, last year -- to the day -- and it was probably the same day the year before and the year before that. I was just probably too lazy to write about it. Or perhaps, looking for perfection, I wanted to write about something new. "Who wants to write about the same thing every year?" I might have muttered. But those cycles are, themselves, somehow signals of perfection, concentric circles that bear down on perhaps the perfect sugar cookie.
The Girl's skills, certainly, are improving. Coupled with her imagination, she often creates things that leave me astounded. Her cookies today, for instance, are portraits.
"That's me," she says, pointing to the smiling cookie with chocolate hair. "That's H," she says, pointing to the cooking with dirty-walnut blond hair, referring to the daughter of our sitter. "And that's W," she says of the little boy cookie with a tuft of blond nuts.
The Boy, meanwhile, spent the evening working on perfecting locomotion. At twenty-five pounds, he's a very heavy seven-month-old, and we've wondered if his arms will be up to the challenge of holding up that amount of weight. Tonight, he improvised a bit of locomotion, pushing with his toes and wiggling his body as he supported as much of himself as possible on his elbows. Nudges toward crawling. Nudges toward walking. Nudges toward independence. It starts so early, and before I know it, he too will be informing me of things that are inappropriate, as the Girl likes to do; suggesting that hisideas are really, in fact, better than mine, as the Girl is beginning to do.
Still, for now, I'm boss. When I say, "time for bed," it is. I still make reality with my words. For now.
I end my evening with its own little bit of perfection, including Zimmerman's performance of Chopin's four ballades, but most especially his "Ballade No. 2."
Perfection, and due to the fact that Zimmerman can play this again and again, without missing a single not, without a flaw of any kind, it is true perfection, not just some euphemism for "very, very good."