Isaac’s Robot Cake!

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Robot cake

I pretty much spent the entire day yesterday making a robot cake and blowing up 125 balloons. I consider it a day well spent, even though all of the balloons were popped within ten minutes once the party started, and the cake quickly became a headless, armless little lump of a robot. The party was wild! And noisy! And rambunctious! But Isaac had a wonderful time, slept late this morning, and then announced that he feels so lucky to be part of this family. I went on and on about Isaac yesterday, so I’ll just share a few pictures today. Here’s Isaac, wearing my shirt, blowing out his birthday candles…

Here’s a series of pictures he did for a flipbook. I just love them! I love the way his little brain works! It’s only part way done, and I’m on tenterhooks to see how it ends.

I made the cake with non-cake pans, I used an oven-proof bowl for the head, a souffle dish for the body, a small square baking dish for the feet (cut in half into two rectangles) and three cupcakes each for the arms. I used m&ms to make the control panels, and twizzlers to make the hoses, because Isaac assures me that robots have hoses. My policy is to make an ugly cake look nice with lots of candy, and make a messy house look good with lots of balloons, so that’s what we did!

And Isaac says his favorite song is Brianstorm by the Arctic Monkeys, so here it is!
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Wild rice & french lentils with roasted mushrooms & butternut squash with cauliflower and carrot puréee

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Wild rice, french lentils and roasted vegetables

We’ve had our power back for over a week now – we’ve had it back as long as we’d lost it. But I still have dreams every night that we don’t have power, and I wake up in a panic. I’m embarrassed that it affected me so strongly, but I’m not alone in my residual stressedness. I’ve talked to many people around town who say that they, too, are having trouble recovering from the incident. They say it feels like getting over the flu – they feel physically tired and draggy and unwell. It’s stress! So strange and powerful a force. The other day on the radio we heard a news story about people driven out of their home by war – worried about keeping their families warm and fed through the coming winter. A small part of me thought, “I know what that feels like!” And then the rest of me thought – “no you do not! Don’t be absurd! You have no idea!” We were anxious and uncomfortable, but we were never really in danger, once the storm had passed. We had a fully stocked grocery store 15 minutes away. We have a house, with walls that keep out the worst of the cold, even when the heat isn’t on, and with doors that lock. We have relatives an hour away who got power back before we did. This is something I think about quite frequently – even before the storm hit. I think about people who don’t have my comfortable life. Who don’t have the luxuries that I’ve come to consider necessities – hot water, electricity, my choice of pretty much any food I can think of. I think about refugees and fugitives – people driven out of their homes by war or occupation. In my own life, I’ve come to realize that it’s the small, every-day things that ultimately make me happy or anxious or disgruntled. I wonder if it’s the same for people who are completely unsettled and unstable. I found myself so undone by … what? anxiety? Discomfort? … that I couldn’t concentrate on much of anything, large or small. I’d been so anxious about the election – so worried that Obama wouldn’t win, but on election night I couldn’t concentrate on the results coming in, and I couldn’t let myself feel as happy and relieved as I should have that he won. I could only feel anxious about when we’d get our power back. I couldn’t think clearly about the bigger political picture. It made me wonder about times and places when the bigger political situation causes stressful personal circumstances. Can you find enough strength and hope to change the situation when you’re brought down by anxiety about your next meal, or when you don’t have a safe, warm home, and winter is coming?

I like wild rice, but I don’t cook it very often, because I’m so comfortable cooking basmati, that it’s a worry-free situation for me. Quick, tasty and dependable. This dish combines wild rice with basmati and french lentils. It’s very autumnal, especially with the addition of roasted butternut squash and mushrooms, and the flavorings of sage and rosemary. I thought this was really tasty – savory, a bit sweet, a bit smoky with the cheese. Comforting! I made a purée of cauliflower and carrots to go with this, and flavored it with sweet smoky spices like cardamom and ginger. Sweet and soft where the rice is earthy and full of texture. A nice combination!

Here’s Police on My Back by The Clash. It might sound silly, but this is one of those songs that gets me to thinking about how you find hope and happiness when your life is dangerously uncertain.
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Isaac’s birthday! and Curried carrot, cauliflower and cashew bisque and seeded biscuits

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It’s Isaac’s birthday! He was born seven years ago on a golden glowing fall day, just like this one. I felt such a surge of joy and love when he was born, and it hasn’t really abated in these last seven years. My sweet, small, jolly Isaac is getting tall and thin. It’s hard, with the second one, to notice all the changes – he’s always the little one. He’s so excited about his birthday. He was sad that halloween was cancelled, and needed assurance that nobody could cancel his birthday, not even the mayor. He was a robot for halloween, the cutest robot you’ve ever seen. I walked him to the consolation party at the school, and he looked out of his toilet-paper tube eye-holes at all his friends running around to the dance music. He sat on a metal folding chair against the wall, because it’s actually hard to do the robot, when you are a robot. He sat and waited for the faux trick-or-treeting. I wonder what goes on in his busy mind, at times like this. I want to tell him to run around with his friends, because I worry about him feeling lonely, but I’m glad that he doesn’t need to. He’s always been very self-sufficient and content with his own company. He’ll sit for long periods of time drawing and singing. Inventing worlds and creatures to live in them. He’s compelled to draw, and he’s almost always happy with the results. He sings constantly, about everything going on in his life. He sings his life, with sweet, pretty songs that get stuck in your head. He talks a lot, too. He’s always had a lot to say, and a smart, clear, peculiar way of saying it. He talks faster and louder and in a higher pitch when he’s nervous or angry, until only dogs can hear him. He likes to talk to everybody he meets, telling them things I sometimes wish he wouldn’t. (“Mom, isn’t that the boss you don’t like?” Heh heh, noooo, that’s some other boss…) You can’t really look at Isaac without wanting to snuggle him, and he’s a natural cuddler, he’ll cuddle you right out of bed. He’s a man who has invented an entire vocabulary around cuddling. There’s the circle cuddle, the tent cuddle, the birthday cuddle, the super-fast, intense, concentrated cuddle (actually I invented that one.) He’ll tell you that he loves you and you’re fun to be with, just because he feels it. (For now!) He’s frustratingly vague and flighty. He doesn’t understand the concept of walking in a straight line. He floats and spins and stops and goes. He won’t tell you he wants something till after it’s gone. He’ll walk right by a brand new bike on his birthday, back and forth many times, and you’ll have to tell him that it’s there. (Whereas Malcolm could sense a brand new bike in the house, if it was hidden behind closed doors several floors away.) He’s got pale golden hair, and pale soft skin, and he glows with all of the radiance of his bright cheerful sweetness.

I’m going to tell you something shocking. Isaac doesn’t generally like my cooking. It’s true! Hard to believe, I know. It’s tempting to say that Isaac only likes pale foods with butter, but the truth is he loves sharp, spicy strong-flavored food. He loves olives, and capers. And his favorite food is Indian food. Which is why he liked this soup. He refused to taste it, at first, but I gave him a small bite with basmati rice, and he went on to eat a whole bowl. He really liked it!! I was so proud. Everybody liked it, actually. It’s simple and flavorful, and smooth, and nice with the biscuits, which have a bit of texture from the seeds. I used nigella seeds, black sesame seeds and mustard seeds, but use what you have!

Here’s Memphis Minnie with I’m Gonna Bake My Biscuits. I’ll let Isaac choose the song when I tell you about his birthday cake!

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Spinach and white beans on toast & Oatmeal, black pepper and nutmeg bread

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Spinach and beans on toast

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on hold, today. We’re switching to a cable internet connection. Apparently, this makes everything work much faster, so you have plenty of extra time to remain on hold with the cable company. But did I waste my time? Oh no, I did not! I watched videos of Elizabeth Cotten playing guitar and banjo. My god, she kills me! Here is her story as briefly paraphrased from the brief paraphrasing that is wikipedia. She was born in 1895 in North Carolina to a musical family. She played her brother’s banjo, and when when she was still very little, she took a job as a maid in order to buy herself a guitar. She and her brother would watch the freight trains run by their house on a single track while they chopped wood and drew up water. And they would sing as they worked. Elizabeth started writing songs, including Freight Train, probably her best known song. At thirteen Elizabeth began working full-time as a maid. At fifteen she was married, and shortly thereafter she had a daughter. She gave up the guitar, and didn’t play for twenty-five years. When her daughter was married, Elizabeth divorced her husband. She worked briefly in a department store. While there, she helped a lost child find her mother. That child was Penny Seeger, of the Seeger Seegers, the famous musical family. They took her home as a maid. She played one of their guitars, learned to play again almost from scratch, was recorded by Mike Seeger, and went on to perform with him, and become quite well-known in the circle of the folk song world. Elizabeth Cotten is left-handed, so she plays guitar and banjo upside down, plucking out the melody with her thumb. This is so remarkable to me! When she plays it sometimes sounds as if two guitars are playing at once. But she’s playing with two fingers! She taught herself to play, she turned everything upside down, and she made something sweeter and more beautiful than anything I’ve heard “correctly” played.

I found this video of her playing and talking. I guess it was made in 1978, and it seems as though it was shot on 16 mm, and roughly edited. I love everything about it. I love the darkness, and the silences around her playing, when she just sits and waits. I love the stories she tells. I like to think about her life, which seems so strange and important, and which I can only get a sideways, glancing picture of in my mind.

I made a loaf of bread the other day, with ground toasted oats, honey, black pepper and a pinch of nutmeg. I made the dough very soft and wet, so that the bread had a wide open crumb, kind of like a crumpet. I think it turned out very good. The flavor is subtle, you taste the honey, but the pepper and nutmeg are only hinted at. One night when I came home from work, I wanted a quick and comforting meal, so I sauteed some spinach and white beans and spread them on toast made from my oatmeal bread. I melted some cheese on my toast, too. This is sort of inspired by beans on toast and creamed spinach on toast. That’s a thing, right?

Oatmeal bread

Here’s a link to an Elizabeth Cotten album on spotify, I hope.

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Savory sweet potato, turnip and pecan galette with smoked gouda and cranberry sauce

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Sweet potato & cranberry galette

During the power outage (is she still going on about that? yes, but I’m almost done) it sometimes seemed to me that Malcolm has enough energy and Isaac is bright enough to light up the whole town. Monday night, the night of the storm, I had the clever idea of having a halloween movie-fest. We’d watched Coraline and were half-way through The Corpse Bride. Poor little Isaac was already hiding in the next room, creeping in to watch half a scene, and racing out again at the extra-spooky parts. And then the house went dark. Inky black dark, with wave upon wave of rain and wind battering the windows. Heh heh! Nothing to worry about here, boys! From that moment on I felt that I had to be brave and make the best of the situation for the boys. Of course I didn’t do such a good job of that, but I tried. Wednesday before the power came on we dropped them at school, and then I came back to the cold, silent house and indulged in a little breakdown. The truth is, the boys didn’t seem to mind the situation all that much. They handled it much better than I did. They were cheerful, especially Malcolm – nothing seemed to phase him. He didn’t mind not going to school and not taking baths, of course. He’s never felt the cold all that much, unless he’s sick. If TV wasn’t an option, he didn’t miss it. He loved making a fire in the backyard and holding bread over it to toast. He liked to play with the candles, which the small drops of wax on every single table in the house will forever remind us. He likes to be with his brother, though he drives him absolutely crazy. He liked to walk all around town, scrounging for interesting things thrown up by the storm. He liked playing games by candlelight. I taught him how to play spit, and he plays it exactly the way you’d expect him too. He’s smart and fast, but he keeps his cards in messy piles, which slows him down. I played blokus with Isaac, and though he’s sweet as sugar and was trying to let me win, he won anyway. Isaac seemed a little more nervous. When I sat in the kitchen playing solitaire, he stood close by me talking and talking, in the way he does when he’s anxious. He sang constantly. He sings his life. He seemed to try to fill up the unusual silence with his voice. When he got sick, his fast-paced nervous ramble accelerated as his fever rose, all through the night. When he finally got to sleep in the morning, Clio, who was ill herself, lay back to back with him, smushed up as close as could be. I took him to the emergency room to get a strep test, because none of the doctors had power in their offices. I was worried we’d have to wait for hours and hours, but I nearly cried with how efficient and nice the nurses and doctors were. I’ve spent a lot of time in waiting rooms with Isaac. It might sound siilly, but it’s an oddly precious time for me. We’re both usually a little tired and worried, and Isaac is so sweet and funny and chatty, and it always feels like a pocket of time separate from the rest of our days, running at its own pace in its own little world. In the emergency room the feeling was intensified, because we were so tired, and we were in a hospital, and all the days had been so strange. I had trouble sleeping at night during the blackout, because it was so completely dark and silent and cold. One night I ran through all of the events of the days in my head, cataloguing and documenting, trying to remember through the fog of my worry. It was a dark, cold week, but all of these moments with my boys glowed and shone.

This is something I had thought about making all through the blackout. The day we got power back, I roasted the sweet potatoes and turnips, warming up our icy kitchen and driving away the cold stale smell. We had (and still have!) tons of sweet potatoes. I thought it would taste nice to combine them with turnips (sweet & sharp) and a layer of cranberry sauce (sweet and tangy). Some lovely melted smoked gouda and crunchy pecans would provide the savory balance of texture and flavor. I thought it was very good. Malcolm, who had been back to school for two days, and was catching up on sleep, was so tired that he burst into tears and said, “I don’t always want pie. Sometimes I want a nice soup!” I didn’t have a full stick of butter left in my empty fridge, so I added some olive oil, and it really resulted in a flaky, crispy crust, so I might try it again! We ate the galette with potatoes roasted with cumin and paprika, which turned out very nice as well.

Here’s Velvet Underground with Beginning to See the Light. We’ve been teaching the boys about VU. And everything felt so upside down we very nearly did have wine in the morning and breakfast at night!

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Roasted carrot and sweet potato bisque (and more Eliza)

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Roasted sweet potato bisque

I feel like I’m in slow motion moving through a fog. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I have so much that I want to do, that I’m not doing any of it, and I frequently find myself on the couch with a soft warm puppy rather than attending to my important tasks. I blame it on the power failure, dammit!! I used up all my batteries, apparently, and now I’m blinking and stuttering like a machine about to lose all power. Well…I’ll catch up eventually, or realize that none of it matters. In the meantime, here’s a recipe for soup and another installment of the serialized drama known temporarily as Eliza and Hyssop. (For previous episodes, click here.)

We have ten pounds of sweet potatoes at the moment, from our CSA! And two huge bunches of beautiful carrots. What better way to use them then roasted in this smoky spicy bisque? It’s a very simple soup – just a few ingredients and spices. So it’s quite light, though satisfying. The warm sweet flavor of the vegetables really shines through.

Could be a spoonful of diamonds, gold, or sweet potato bisque!! Here’s Etta James with Spoonful.

And here’s Eliza, after the jump. When last we left her, she had raced to the top of the stairs, looking for the boy who had come to enlist her help in healing his brother…
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Masa harina bread

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Masa harina bread

Hello! I worked all day, and I’m discouraged and tired. I had so many things I’ve been thinking about for a while, that I wanted to say here. While it was slow at work, I was going to sit and write it all down. But I couldn’t or didn’t. Instead, I’d like to tell you about this evening, after dinner. Standing in our dark but strangely balmy backyard I watched Malcolm, wearing a skeleton shirt, playing tag with Clio, wearing her customary smoky grey ensemble, with the flashing white at paws and throat. The white bones and white patches shone. They floated and dashed in-and-out of the darkness like the sprites they are, dodging and shining. They fell in and out of the mythical quince bush. They were berserker with the pent-up energy. I love them so much. Earlier today, Malcolm said, “Every person is a superhero, every person has a superhuman strength, because we’re all living skeletons.” Which leads to one of my inexplicably favorite moments as a parent…we were sitting in the car, driving back-and-forth to-or-from a warm house during the blackout, and Isaac said, “Why did the skeleton cross the road?” Before he could fill in the punch line, Malcolm cried out, “Because he wanted to SHAKE THAT!” I can’t explain, even to myself, why that fills me with so much joy. What a ramble this is!

This masa harina bread is like a dense and flavorful cornbread. As you might remember, I’m a huge fan of masa harina. It’s like very fine corn meal, with a mysterious and lovely flavor. The batter for this bread does not give you confidence – it’s like pouring wet sand into your bread pan. And as it cooks, it’s sort of ugly and gnarled. But it’s lovely to eat. Isaac loved it to pieces. It’s quite a comforting loaf, and I seem to be stuck on comfort food this week!

And I’m OBSESSED with this song. I play it over and over. It plays itself in my head in the middle of the night. It’s so pretty and cheerful and contagious, musically. And the lyrics are so hopeless and dire, but beautiful and sometimes it seems they’re true, but this was a hopeful week, politically!

Check out the real situation:
Nation war against nation.
Where did it all begin?
When will it end?
Well, it seems like: total destruction the only solution,
And there ain’t no use: no one can stop them now.
Ain’t no use: nobody can stop them now.

Give them an inch, they take a yard;
Give them a yard, they take a mile (ooh);
Once a man and twice a child
And everything is just for a while.

It’s Bob Marley with Real Situation.

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Crispy soft cornbread pudding

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Cornbread pudding

When the power went out last september (I think it must have been during Irene, but it’s all a blur at this point) Malcolm’s first concern was making me coffee. We can smash the beans with a hammer! And boil water over the fire! Must…get…mom…her…coffee!! Ha ha! As if I was some kind of caffeine addict. Well, okay, I’m probably a tiny bit addicted to caffeine. But I’m not the only one! You should have seen this place by the third powerless day. An army of hollow-eyed zombies roamed the town fiending for coffee! The first day after the storm, I wandered the drizzly town, feeling very tired and dejected, but my friend Pat made me a cup of coffee on his gas stove, and my day instantly cheered. The second day, David braved the compromised roads to make a journey to dunkin donuts. And on day three, we made coffee in our own home. We bought ground beans, and boiled a pot of water on the grill. We grilled coffee! And tea! It seems like such a little thing, but the act of making coffee in (or just outside the door of) our own kitchen restored some small sense of normalcy, and made me feel nearly ecstatic. (Or maybe the coffee was unusually highly caffeinated.) It’s not just the caffeine, it’s the simple daily rite of grinding the beans and boiling the water. (Or lying warm in bed listening to David downstairs performing the ritual.) I eat the same thing for breakfast every day. I feed my boys at the same time, most days, and they’re fairly predictable in what they’d like to eat. David eats peanut butter and jelly for lunch almost every day. Anything can happen at dinner time, I like to experiment and make odd meals, as you know, but that cooking and scheming is part of the pattern of my days. I hadn’t realized quite how routinized we were, as a family, until this ten day spate of powerlessness. I hadn’t realized how much the food that I prepare and eat, and the patterns of preparing it and eating it were involved in my comfort and ability to function. It made me feel a little anxious. I worried about the boys getting enough healthy food, even though they probably ate as well as usual. And anxiety makes me want to bake, which, obviously, wasn’t an option. We had fun straying from our usual pattern. We grilled scrambled eggs and toast, which was absolutely delicious. We were more social than usual, and shared meals with friends – everybody bringing their rapidly spoiling food. But I never felt quite right. I had a constant queasy feeling. And I found myself craving solid comforting food – bread and cheese and potatoes. One day we went and bought cans of beans and jars of artichoke hearts and roasted red peppers, and I was actually very excited about the prospect of cooking them over the fire. But dusk came early and the evenings were chilly, and I lost my enthusiasm for standing in the drizzly yard dirtying pots and pans I didn’t have hot water to clean. So what did we eat? We ate grilled toast and grilled bagels and grilled scrambled eggs. We ate rapidly thawing veggie dogs and veggie burgers. We ate pasta at a friend’s house. I made salads with cans of chickpeas and hearty vegetables like carrots and olives and cherry tomatoes. We had a few bags of potato chips scrounged from the dark, cash-only convenience store, and ate quantities of chocolate bars left over from our cancelled halloween. Peanut butter and jelly. Crackers and peanut butter. All-in–all, we ate lots of good food. We lived comfortably. I’m so grateful to have my warm home back, and my working stove and hot water. I cooked up a storm the first day with power – and I haven’t really stopped since. But I think it’s good to shake things up sometimes. So maybe we’ll grill scrambled eggs and toast one morning, just for fun, but I’ll be glad for the hot water needed to wash the dishes after!

We didn’t eat this over the last ten days, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I was craving. It’s comforting and warm and crispy but soft and cheesy. It’s halfway between a sort of corn pudding and cornbread. If you’ve ever made semolina dumplings or roman gnocchi, it’s the same idea, as is yorkshire pudding and choux pastry. But this is made with cornmeal. So it happens to be gluten free! I made it twice in the weeks before the storm, with varying amounts of cornmeal. If you make it with the larger quantity, it’s more like a cornbread, and with the smaller quantity, it’s softer, more like a baked pudding. One time I flavored it with oregano, cayenne and sharp cheddar, and the next I used mozzarella, basil, rosemary and black olives. We ate it with spinach and chickpeas the first time, and with a saucy, tomatoe-y soup the next.

Here’s Comfort Ye from the Messiah, performed by Paul Elliot and the Acadamy of Ancient music, which is (I think) the version I grew up with. It’s so warm and calm.
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Power! and hurricane chili with sweet potatoes, red beans, kale and pumpkin ale

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Clio sleeps on Malcolm

The Ordinary has power!! POWER! All the lights shut off the evening of the storm, and yesterday, on DAY TEN (!) they came on just as the first snow started to fall. I cried like a baby! First of all, I know we’ve been very lucky in many ways. Our home and our family are safe and sound. But it’s been such a strange week and a half! So memorable – certain vivid moments glow in my head – and yet altogether such a blur, each day melted into the other, and now it all feels like some strange dream. We had some fun, even euphoric, moments, but mostly it was stressful. I’m exhausted, despite having done very nearly nothing for ten days. I spent ridiculous amounts of time sitting and waiting. We went for lots of walks, and played games and wrote stories and read a little. We stayed a few nights with our kind warm-homed, warm-hearted families. But I felt foolishly incapable of concentrating. And then it got too cold to hold a pen. I was embarrassingly frazzled by the whole situation. It was as though without electricity I couldn’t do even simple non-electrical tasks like cutting my nails. I spent a lot of time sitting and thinking, and you know you’re going to hear all about that! The past day and a half have been spent trying to catch up – cleaning out the tank of dead fish and the fridge full of spoiled food, scrubbing down the toilets after two little boys have peed in the dark for more than a week. And then filling the fridge with good food and baking anti-depressant oatmeal-chocolate chip-spice cookies to warm up our kitchen and fill it with good smells. I missed cooking! I missed writing! I missed writing about cooking! So I’ll tell you all about everything, eventually. Whether you like it or not!

But for now I’ll leave you with a recipe for the chili I made last Monday before the power went out. It has sweet potatoes from the farm, red beans, yellow split peas, kale, corn, pumpkin ale, sweet spices, spicy spices. I started it early in the afternoon in case the power went out, and it sat on the stove for a few hours, but we could have eaten it sooner. I kept throwing other things in as the day wore on, so it ended up with quite a few ingredients! Use what you have! We ate it with basmati rice and cheesy garlic bread. The next day we spread some inside of tortillas with sharp cheddar, folded them over, wrapped them in foil, and cooked them in a fire in the back yard. Good as well! I didn’t take a picture of the chili, because I was worried about batteries in the camera, and I was just too off-kilter to remember! So you get a picture of Clio lying on Malcolm’s head instead, during the storm. He makes her feel safe, and she was protecting him, too, I think. She fell asleep like that!

And here’s a list of songs about power and electricity. Can you think of any I should add? Some of the songs might be a little sweary. Listen to the first one, at least, though. Curtis Mayfield with the demo version of Power to the People. (Who gave me that? I love it to pieces!!)
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Spicy fava-roasted carrot puree and caraway pepper flatbreads

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Spicy fava carrot purée

We’re hunkered and bunkered down, waiting for hurricane Sandy to stop by. At the moment we’ve got driving rain and fairly wild wind. But we still have power, so I can’t complain. We’re all a little stir crazy, but I’m actually having a nice day. We’re all together, the boys didn’t have school, and we were asked to stay off the roads, so David is home, too. I baked a cake. I made a big pot of sweet potato, red bean, kale and pumpkin ale chili that will hopefully keep warm for dinner if the power goes out, and I’m currently drinking the rest of the pumpkin ale. We’ll sit and draw for a while. I can’t complain!

I’m not up to my usual rambling nonsense, so I made a playlist about storms, floods, winds and rain. I’m open to suggestions for songs to add!

caraway flatbread

And I’ll just tell you quickly about this yummy meal. Loosely based on my understanding of tunisian carrot salads and on Ethiopian ful, this is a spicy puree of carrots, olives, and fava beans (the dried and cooked kind, I used a canned variety) Quick to make, and delicious with these caraway seed flatbreads.

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