The beets are starting to work their fermentation magic for barszcz z uszkami. And the first baking (though not strictly for Christmas) is done.
First Preparation
food and cooking
Two Days in a Row
It’s gradually cooling off, which means we might be spending more time around our fire pit.
We cooked dinner over it two nights in a row now, and I’m already thinking about what to cook next weekend.
Dinner
Busy Wednesday
The morning was all about blueberries. We’re drowning in them. We’ve never had anything close to this amount of berries. The birds have left them alone, and although a heavy rainstorm knocked off a substantial number of young berries/blossoms a few weeks ago, we still have so many berries we don’t know what to do with them. We’ve eaten them by the handful, given them to friends, put them in cereal, frozen them, and today, made preserves. (What about cobblers? Well, our oven is currently out of commission — talk about bad timing.)
So while K and the Boy worked on preserves today, I went out and picked a few more berries.
We’re right back where we started from. Except that we have a few jars of preserves now.
Closing Dinner
When K closes on a house, we splurge a little and have a special dinner. Tonight, it was crab cakes and crab legs.
The best thing about crab legs (other than the taste) — they’re fun to eat as well.
Dinner
Yes, that’s right — cinnamon rolls.
Baking 2020
Four-times-milled poppy seeds for makowiec. A little boy who couldn’t get enough of the cookie cutter. A daughter who made cookies with chocolate chips and crushed candy canes (they are as sublimely amazing as they sound). A Polish mother overseeing and guiding it all — who are we kidding? Doing most of the magic.
It’s getting close to Christmas.
Trying Coffee
The Boy is often eager to try new things.
Today, he tried a sip from my coffee.
It wasn’t a hit.
Chicken Fingers
We’ve gotten into some lazy food habits, which means some unhealthy food habits. We’re in the process of turning them around.
One thing has to do with snacking. The Girl is often very hungry again later in the evening, even if she’s eaten a full dinner. Teens tend to be that way. She’s been eating a few chicken nuggets from Aldi as her evening snack a couple of times a week for some time now.
Today, she learned how to make her own chicken fingers from fresh chicken. Completely healthy? Probably not. Better than what she was eating? Definitely.
Day 60: Eighth Birthday
A proper birthday has to start with a proper birthday breakfast and a phone call from Babcia. For E, this meant an omelette for breakfast. Never mind that this was only the second time he’s ever had an omelet, a proper omelette, but he fell in love with it earlier this week, on Mother’s Day, and decided that it was his favorite breakfast of all time. Making omelets though is a time-consuming task, so although I layered the sauteed onions, sauteed peppers, and bacon bits very carefully for the Boy, the rest of us got it all mixed up in scrambled eggs.
“I could have it that way, I guess,” he confessed. “It’s the same thing, just all mixed up.”
The phone call from Babcia was a little less fluid. E is reticent to speak Polish, so although he understands everything Babcia says, he usually responds in English then turns to K, expecting a translation. Today Babcia tried to help him out, tried to ease his anxiety. She asked him simple questions like, “Are the flowers blooming?” or “What color are the flowers?” Yet he was still reluctant to speak Polish.
School today for him was relatively simple. At first, he wanted yesterday to complete as much of today’s work in addition to yesterday’s work as possible. But yesterday in the afternoon he decided that was not the best plan after all. He was ready for some free time. This meant of course that he had all the work for today to complete.
At the beginning of this quarantine, a day’s worth of work was just that: a day’s worth of work. The amount was greater than it is now, to be sure, but he fussed incessantly how about the frustrations he was feeling, about the difficulty of the math problems, about the length of the readings. We are half expecting such antics today, interspersed with cries of, “But it’s my birthday. Why do I have to work on my birthday?” However, he plowed through his work with relative ease, making it through math, which was subtracting three-digit numbers from three-digit numbers, each problem requiring regrouping and then word problems, in less than fifteen minutes. He wrote two more chapters of his frog/toad book and was done.
In the afternoon, we headed back down to the spot where we’d caught and inadvertently killed a minnow yesterday. I thought perhaps we might have a repeat, feared it in some ways — who wants to just go around killing little fish? Yet E was keen to try again. We did try again, and caught three fish. Two of them made it back to the water fine.
One of them — well, we didn’t quite hook him in the mouth but somehow hooked him through his body. He was already bleeding when we pulled him out of the water.
While we were down there, L came to the balcony and yelled across the yard, “You guys need to come back! Now!” At first, I was afraid that something had happened to Papa. Of late he’s been spending afternoons on the deck wallowing in nostalgia by exploring songs he hasn’t heard in decades, all thanks to Spotify.
Instead, we all got a pleasant surprise:
E’s best friend’s mother drove him by our house to wish the Boy happy birthday.
As for our celebration, we played a trick on him that Nana and Papa played on me a couple of times: give him something that’s relatively worthless without the other item. Like a cable to hook up a laptop to something suggesting that it might work with an old laptop, then giving a new one as a surprise (a la Nana and Papa).
We gave him a tablet case and screen protector. He’d been asking for a tablet for some time, and we thought we’d see what would happen if he got only the empty shell. “You can keep and maybe you’ll get a tablet next year,” I suggested. “Oh, that’s great,” he said very calmly — not really upset, not really thrilled.
Then, when he opened Papa’s present, lo and behold — an Amazon Fire, just for him.
Finally, there was the cake. L began working on the cake yesterday and decided to add to it today. A two-tiered cake, each with two layers.
The slices were impressive to say the least. K and I split one: she took the top tier, and I worked on the bottom one. The Girl is getting the flavors down — she’s still not thrilled with the presentation, though.
“Patience and practice,” K said to her. Though perhaps not quite so much practice while we’re all locked down.
Previous Years
Day 43: Cooperation
School in the morning.
Pierogi in the afternoon.
Games in the evening.
Day 33: Celebration and Smothered
Celebration
Today is Papa’s birthday. Seventy-nine. I remember when he turned forty. I was only eight then, and because of various religious interpretations, we didn’t actually celebrate birthdays, but I knew it was significant. He’s stayed forty or fifty in my mind’s eye ever since.
Sixty just seemed like an extension — a little older, maybe a little slower, but basically the same. Seventy? Now nearly eighty.
You know what’s coming — “Soon I’ll find myself almost eighty, wondering where the time went…”
This was a bitter-sweet birthday, though: the first one without Nana. A few days ago, K asked him what he’d like for his birthday dinner. He thought about it for quite a while and asked if we had Nana’s Chinese casserole recipe.
“Nope, but I’m sure we could find it.”
When was the last time we had that? It must have been twenty-five to thirty years since I’d had that. Still, I knew what the recipe must look like: I found something seemingly identical and K tried to fix it while I was pulling up the mass of briars that had grown where our composter used to be. Neither one of us are experienced casserole makers, so it turned out a little, well, moist. But it tasted just like Papa and I remembered.
“Brings back some memories, doesn’t it Pop?” I asked. (I don’t know why, but I’ve taken to calling him Pop again. I used to call him that when I was in high school, but since L was born, he’s just been Papa.)
“Sure does.”
Smothered
I used to say I could play chess when I really couldn’t. I could move the pieces around, sure, but I really had no deeper understanding of the game, and I didn’t even really know some of the basics. Give me a rook and the king against the opponents lone king and I would have had no idea how to mate.
Even now, there’s one mate I can only barely understand and probably couldn’t pull off: mate with one knight, one bishop, and the king. Here’s a good intro:
Yet there’s one mate that’s in the realm of mortals. “Probably the most popular checkmate pattern, the Smothered Mate often fascinates new chess players and retains its popularity even after one becomes proficient.” So says Chess End Games, and that’s no exaggeration. Every time I’ve taught someone the smothered mate pattern, I’ve gotten looks of amazed awe. The knight pops into a square and mates the king from a distance — beautiful
But Chess End Games is selling it short. There are several ways to achieve a smothered mate in chess, but the most satisfying is with a queen sacrifice. Any win involving a queen sac (chess-speak there) is satisfying because, well, you’re sacrificing your queen, the most powerful piece on the board — until it isn’t. Queen sac smothered mates are rare, though, because most decent players see it coming and resign beforehand.
In fact, I’ve only done it once — last night.
It was a wild game, and I had taken a gamble that wasn’t paying off. In fact, not just down an exchange but down an entire rook, I felt sure mate was coming. My opponent sacrificed the exchange, though, taking my knight on f4.
I took with the pawn thinking that I might be able to slide the rook over to g2 to put pressure on g7. It would have been easily mitigated with a pawn move g6, but it was the only thing I saw.
Black took my undefended d4 pawn, threatening my rook. My first instinct was to continue with my plan and move my rook to g2, but then I saw it: my queen and knight were perfectly placed, and with black’s rook pair gone, it looked perfect.
Queen took on e6 with check. From here, mate was almost inevitable. Almost. I thought black might resign or bock with his rook, which would have led to mate with black’s king on h8 and white’s queen on f8 or d8 after having taken the double-attacked rook.
But black moved the king to h8 and my heart went pitter-patter. Could I get the smothered mate or would black resign?
The first move was to pop the knight in for a check. If black took with the rook, I was in trouble: my next move would have been to take with the queen, then black’s queen would deliver a nearly-fatal check on f2 and mate would have been coming. But black didn’t see it.
King to g8. “It’s going to happen!” I thought.
Knight to h6 gave a double check, so black cannot take the knight or simply block the queen,
Black had to move back to h8 — or resign. “Oh, please don’t resign!
No resignation! Next came the most seemingly crazy move ever: the queen slid into g7 for check. Black could not take with the king because the knight defended the queen; black had to take with the rook.
The only problem is, in doing so, black took away the king’s only remaining flight square. The king was boxed in completely.
Knight to f7 for mate.
I can’t remember the last time I smiled so after a simple chess game.
Day 7: Sunday
With the diocese of Charleston making the decision to close all churches in the current emergency, today had a different feel from most Sundays and a somewhat different feel from the previous six days.
Previous six days? Has this only been going on a week? It was indeed a week ago that we learned the governor of South Carolina was closing all schools for the rest of the month, but I swear it feels like that was weeks ago. I know it’s been going on for several months now with the original outbreak in China, and while I’m tempted to go on a rant here about how much time we wasted between that initial outbreak in China and even a week ago when everything started shutting down all because our narcissistic shallow president views everything as if it’s about him and went so far as to call the pandemic a hoax at one of his rallies and still behaves as if this will all blow over because he’s now taking it seriously and pretending to put some resources into it — no, I’ll resist that urge and simply point out that it feels like it’s been longer than a week.
First, there was no church — no Mass at a church, that is. Second, there was church — something like it, a series of readings and a recorded homily that Kinga, the kids, and Papa did while I was out taking the dog for a walk. It just didn’t feel like a Sunday.
Is it possible that someone could look at this and understand how much exponentially worse it could get with a different virus with, say, a 60% death rate and understand that something like that could very well lurking in our future and still, understanding that a belief in God would necessitate an acceptance that God would have also created such a virus, it would have been in his plan, part of his mysterious ways — could someone hold all this in their head and still believe in a benevolent god? Thinking how relatively mild this is compared to what could be or even has been makes it all but impossible for me.
Another change: we got a new hot water heater installed today. We’ve been wanting to do it for some time, and I’ve had a feeling that our old heater was going to malfunction any day. The guys who did the installation for us — the guys who did the renovation of the carport, turning it into Papa’s room — were going to come next week, but with so much uncertainty, they decided to come today. We’re expecting a significant drop in our power bill as this was our last power-hungry appliance/system in our house. Changing the HVAC system cut our power bill by 30-50% (depending on the usage); this change should result in additional significant savings considering the heater dates from 1992 — the year after I graduated from high school.
Why am I so negative about all this? Why do I see only gray to any silver lining? It’s my eternal battle.
In the afternoon, the kids and I went out in the backyard to — guess — shoot. The dog does not like when we shoot as she gets stuck up on the deck for her own good…
E and I have figured out that if we fire toward something a little bit darker than the surrounding area, we can actually follow the flight of the bb, so we’ve taken to firing into the forest behind our neighbor’s house on occasion. We’ve also been trying to shoot from various positions in the yard, all of them significantly farther away from where we normally shoot. And we still take shots at the dog’s fetch ball because, well, why not?
After shooting, the Girl decided to bake a cake. The aesthetics were something like I would produce, but that comes with time. The taste is all that matters, and I think we all agreed: it was delicious.
Random day, random thoughts.
Carbs
The Boy was eating dinner — spaghetti and meatballs because of volleyball practice and the need to eat by five — and asked if he could be excused.
“Eat a couple more bites of spaghetti,” I said.
“But I ate all the meat!” he protested. “Now it’s just carbs!”
“Well, you need some carbs, too.”
“I’ve had a ton of carbs today!” he insisted. “Bread with lunch! My cereal in the morning!” A pause. “Daddy, what are carbs?”
Cooking Dinner
Kwasnica
It was supposed to be for my birthday; instead, we went out for fish.
I’d take this any day over just about any dish.
Slow Day
The Boy had to go to the dentist to get some kind of protective covering over his molars. I don’t remember ever doing that for the Girl, and I certainly didn’t have it done to me. Then again, how would I know? That would have been almost 40 years ago.
K got some zurek going. Such a strangely wonderful soup — only Eastern Europeans could think of something like that. Let rye flour ferment and then use that as a basis for soup. Genius.
The Boy did a little work on IXL. It’s one of my favorite tools as a teacher — one of the few things the district provides that I think is genuinely useful.
And then K and I made another baklava for tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve party. I think she and I have pretty much mastered it. The trick is not to follow the recipe: the syrup is only supposed to simmer as long as the pastry part bakes, but I found quite by accident that letting it cook twice as long makes it wonderfully gooey on the bottom. Then again, one has to thin it a bit before pouring it on the pastry. I used a little brandy this time. Again — like life, don’t follow that recipe too closely.
Big Monday
The first order of the day: get the front end alignment done on the Paddy Wagon (or minivan as others might call it). The Boy, learning that I was going to take the car and ride my bike back, insisted on going with me.
Second, later in the day, a playdate with D, his best friend in kindergarten who changed schools for first grade. D’s mother, R, was a Spanish teacher at my school, and it just so happened that our boys were in the same class, and it just so happened that they became great friends, independent of any intervention from parents. The playdate included almost everything the Boy loves, namely Legos and swimming.
Later, eat an enormous dinner: salmon, potatoes, and one of his absolute favorites, asparagus. (How many seven-year-olds love asparagus, mushrooms, and blood sausage?)
Clean Plate
Finally, after a little rest to let the food settle, go on a seven-mile bike ride.
Any wonder he went to sleep almost immediately?
Thee Pictures for Sunday
Ice Cream, 1973
More discoveries from the past. Haven’t seen myself in baby pictures in years.
