shiso mama

hmmm, very fake….

better…

oops, too much…

almost there…

ahh, finally!

I’m sorry, my friends, but I am exhausted. I’ll see you soon.

This weekend was supposed to be really small and low-key and casual, a chance for Otis to spend time with family and a few friends. And it was an opportunity for me to cook, which I feel I do so rarely nowadays. What does Otis want to eat? my mother would ask in response to the ideas I listed to her, and my answer was always, “Uh, I dunno.” I sort of figured that at this age, Otis doesn’t truly care what you serve at his party, as long as there’s meat and cake, and you don’t force him to eat vegetables. In my book, that means that I get to make whatever I want to eat.

And what, pray tell, did I want to eat? Well, tonkatsu sandwiches (also known as katsu sando), of course! Tonkatsu is Japanese fried pork cutlet. So, yes, you guessed right, it’s a fried pork sandwich. Sounds kinda gross and absolutely tasty, no? Actually it just sounded gross the first and only time I ate it, but after a few bites, I was looking around at my family members, resenting their loud smacking and their fast eating, and trying to calculate how quickly I would have to eat to be able to eat as many of the remaining sandwiches as I could.

Not convinced? May I remind you that the pork is fried? Deep fried? In fat? Oh, and it’s also got mayonnaise in it, the sweet Japanese kind. How could you arrive at such fat achieving Japan, and the party seemed like the PERFECT opportunity to make them. And it continued to sound like a good idea until I was frying my 24th pork cutlet while still wearing my nightgown, my face feeling like I was 16 years old all over again. But now I cheerfully submit my recipe:

For the tonkatsu, I used pork chops, pounded until they were uniformly thin, and approximately bread sized. I dredged them in flour, then egg, then covered them with panko and fried them until golden and crispy.

For 24 sandwiches, I sliced a head of green cabbage very thinly, and added paper thin slices of half a yellow onion. Then I soaked them together in water for a few minutes and then thoroughly dried them (supposedly it makes the cabbage crunchy, and I think it takes a lot of the bite out of the onion).

I used the big white loaves of Pullman bread that you see at the Asian bakeries, and layered thusly: white bread + cabbage/onion (not too much) + tonkatsu sauce + Japanese mayonnaise + tonkatsu + more tonkatsu sauce + more Japanese mayonnaise + cabbage/onion + white bread. Yes, I know it’s a lot of sauce, but it’s supposed to kind of soak into the meat. The cabbage provides some crunch and prevents the bread from getting too soggy. You can eat it hot (pretty good) or let it sit for a few hours to let the flavors melt and soak in (pretty darned good).

Then there was the matter of the ice cream cake. Did you see that thing?

Oy, it’s a thing of beauty. Like I said, it was candied kumquat and Earl Grey tea sandwiched in vanilla sponge cake and covered in Italian meringue (which has a real saltiness to it). It’s magic. When I cut the cake, it was still pretty stiff from being in our deep freeze, and when I gave Otis his piece, it was a solid hunk. He picked up the entire thing and tried to gnaw on it whole (which I’m pretty sure he tried with his tonkatsu as well).

But that’s not it for the sweets! Here’s something else I made:

Can you tell what it is? It’s marshmallows! I’ve seen homemade marshmallows around, but have always thought that people would be nuts to pay that kind of money when they could just go to the store, buy a jar of Fluff, and sit in front of the TV just the same with change in their pockets. But I think these changed my mind. They’re quite a bit of work, and you have to be careful not to cook the egg whites when you add the boiling sugar syrup, but they literally do melt in your mouth yet have a sort of toothsome quality when you bite into them. They’re disgustingly sweet, though, so I couldn’t really recommend eating the equivalent of a jar-full. I packaged them up with graham crackers, some Valhrona bittersweet chocolate, and directions for making s’mores, another one of my absolute favorite foods in the world. I used a recipe from this book.

I don’t know that these would be particularly appropriate for the kids, but I’m hoping that the parents all enjoyed them as much as we did.

*****

While we’re on the subject of food, here’s what I made tonight for Tuesday Night Dinner with our friends, David, Lynna and Emmett:

It’s kotopita, and the recipe was given to me by a friend of Joanna’s. It’s absolutely amazing, though I wouldn’t dare share the recipe without her permission. It’s a flaky, buttery filo pie with chicken, raisins, cinnamon and a ton of onions in it, and it was mighty tasty. Do you think your friend would approve, Joanna?  It’s not as pretty as hers, of course, but I’m just an amateur.

Phew, what a weekend of celebrating!

a Bajillion bubbles (their term, not mine. though a misnomer, if you ask me):

a little bit of cross-dressing:

some family:

some friends:

not one, but TWO cakes:

(homemade banana cake)

(another ice cream cake - this time candied kumquat and Earl Grey tea)

Pretty good, and not just by two year-old standards. Mama and baba are exhausted. Luckily, we still have ice cream cake, which is pretty good for its restorative properties.

Oh me, oh my. Can you believe it? Today is Otis’s second birthday. We have a fun weekend planned for Otis, with treats and family and friends, but in honor of the big day, F and I thought we would share some of our favorite things about two year old Otis.

1. Otis still smells like baby. What does baby smell like? Well, this one smells like warm milk and buttery brioche. I take every opportunity I can to bury my face in his neck and inhale his sweet baby smell. Oh, and I still sniff his feet, but those can smell pretty foot-y nowadays, what with the running around in his shoes all day long.

2. There’s nothing Otis likes better than a long, luxurious snuggle. Oh wait, that’s a total dream that will never ever come true! But on the bright side, he has become rather affectionate, free with hugs and kisses for everyone. Unfortunately for him, not all kids want to be kissed and hugged, so he’s occasionally been rebuffed by shoves to the face and grand displays of wiping away of the kisses. He remains undeterred.

3. Otis has proven himself a rather adventurous soul, throwing himself into all activities, new and old, without hesitation. He throws himself down the slide face first, approaches new people with a fair amount of ease, and happily explores new terrain by himself (sometimes way too far for our comfort - he is totally unconcerned by not being able to see us at all).

4. Otis’s language skills are developing quickly, and he is constantly surprising us with the new phrases that he’s acquired. He will speak with me in Chinese (which I think is still his primary language; he talks to himself in Chinese, especially at daycare) and will turn around and “translate” for F in English.

All day long he narrates things he sees and memories of favorite things, phrasing them as questions rather than statements. “Bird na? (Where’s the bird?) Car na? Mama na? Baba na? Lion King na?” It’s like living with a real-life voice-over.  All the time.

In the same vein, he has taken to feeding us our lines, hurriedly telling us, “Good night, baby!” or “Thank you, baby!” or “La (love) you, baby!” before we get a chance to open our mouths. It’s funny to hear him say “baby” in that way, in that “Baby, You Can Drive My Car” tone.

5. Otis loves to read! Hooray from two book-loving nerds who always stayed up past bed time reading in near-darkness. Reading time is generally everybody’s favorite time around here. Even if we’re not reading together, we’ll often see him sitting by himself, flipping through his books and concentrating as though he were actually reading. One of his other favorite activities is to spin in circles until he grows so dizzy that he falls down, completely disoriented. And once he’s fallen down, he’ll keep spinning, whether on his butt or on his side. That one we don’t get so much.

I feel like such a sap, getting ever so slighty misty at the thought of Otis’s smell (I think I’ll tear up later when I think about his smell, like when he hits puberty, but for a totally different reason). I even ran out late last night to buy this shampoo that we used when he was first born. I’m totally going to force him to take a bath soon so that I can catch little whiffs of Proustian memories all day long. Hey, it’s kinda my birthday too, isn’t it?

Happy birthday, baby!

Huh, whadya know, Otis didn’t make even one single reference to the fish. What a heartless cad!

Yesterday I went to work to help out at a big family event (hence no Fashion Show Sunday). There was lots of stuff going on - performances, food, art-making and games. And as the day progressed, I started to see lots of kids carrying around bags of tiny little goldfish, which piqued my interest. During a lull in the afternoon, I went to investigate, and discovered that you could pay $1, throw some ping pong balls in the general direction of some cups, and win a fish or four.

I was pretty pleased that I won 2 fish, and even more pleased that they survived the scooter ride home. A coworker even passed along some fish food, so we all gathered around the impromptu bowl we had foraged from the cabinet and watched the fish eat eat eat away. Otis talked about the fish all day today.

Then this afternoon, we transferred the fish to their new home, a cookie jar. I had set out the bowl of water overnight, as strictly ordered by my coworker, so that the water could come to room temperature and the “bad stuff “in our drinking water could evaporate. I should have suspected something when the fish didn’t jump towards the food that Otis and I fed them. “Maybe they’re sleepy,” I told him. If they were dead, they’d float, I told myself. It was not until F stirred them around with a chopstick that I had to finally admit that they were goners, probably from chlorine poisoning (How was I to know 24 hours meant 24, and not just 20 hours?). I should’ve seen it coming when I already saw dead fish floating about in the kids’ bags shortly after they had won them. I’m quite positive that every single fish taken home yesterday was dead by today, since I received absolutely no instructions on how to take care of them. Thanks for nothing, Oakland Parks Dept!

But man, now I’ve hyped up the fish so much to Otis that I’m sure he’ll be anxious to see them again as soon as he wakes up tomorrow, oblivious to their journey out to sea via the sewage system. Not that he’d know the difference, but should I distract him on the fish issue until I’ve had a chance to sneak out and buy some replacements?

We’ve been working on training Otis to stay in bed until 7am (at which point, we rush in with whistles and bullhorn, reading to start our morning calisthenics, of course), and he’ll often talk to himself until his music starts and we come in. This morning, though, he was impatient.

“Mama! Mama! Baba! Baba! Mama! Baba! Mamababamamababamamababamamababa!”

Finally, at 7, I went in, and as soon as I stepped into the relative dark of his room was greeted by: “Otis is mad! Hahahahahahahaha!”

Take that, you crazy subtext-reading hippies!

Today, I worked with a class from one of the public elementary schools that is in our “zone” and the class was so horrible that I questioned whether I would have the fortitude to send Otis to public school after all. How easily my principles seem willing to fall away….

I always have these idyllic visions of sharing the family bed, the three of us one gigantic spooning mass (we even bond in our sleep!). But a night of Rockette kicks to the face and a sore back and neck later, I remember why I’ve been sleeping much better kicking Otis out of our bed.

I realized this morning, as I stared mournfully into Otis’s drawers, that there’s no way we could ever top last week’s outfit. There’s no point in even trying; it would just be a sad half-hearted imitation. The kid’s peaked, and he’s not yet two. From now on, we’ll just have to focus on developing his street-smarts and his sense of humor to get him through life.

Sigh:

I’ve been sewing this week and thinking about our upcoming trip to Taiwan. Where it is hot and sticky, a.k.a. totally and completely miserable. Even though I generally dislike shorts, I decided to sew Otis a pair or two. Today’s denim shorts were my first pair:

I started out with the shorts that were part of the pajamas for Simplicity #8493. But they were so plain that I decided to add some patch pockets. Here is the pocket pattern I drafted, laid atop the Simplicity one. I cut two, laying the side edge of the pattern on the fold of the fabric so that it is doubled. (Make sense? Sorry, my editor went to get his hair cut.) It may be hard to tell from the pictures, but you are essentially sewing one big pocket on each side of the shorts, meaning that the front and back look identical.

Then I sewed bias to the top of the pocket, and turned over 1/4″ on the bottom. (I know it’s a pain to make the bias, but I think you get a much nicer edge because it’s hard to turn and clip the inside curve. To make it easier, you could also just buy bias and use it for both sides.) I sewed the pockets on first, then sewed the rest of the pieces together. The top of the pocket ends up being turned in with the elastic casing, which adds bulk, but the denim I used was thin, so I don’t think it matters too much.

I like the idea of using a plain pattern and adding little details to make it more interesting. There aren’t a whole lot of patterns for little boys. You’ll probably see more of these soon. Also, later this week, I’ll be posting a couple other recycled sweater projects.